


A Case of Correction in Course

by RecessiveJean



Category: Enola Holmes (2020), Enola Holmes Series - Nancy Springer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Crossover, Captivity, Class Issues, F/F, Family, Gen, Kidnapping, Mesmerism, Rescue Missions, Victorian Attitudes, forced marriage (attempted), which is to say the divergence is the crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:47:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 33,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27923251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecessiveJean/pseuds/RecessiveJean
Summary: Paint your own picture, Enola. Don't be thrown off course by other people. Especially men!In which Enola takes her mother's words at least halfway to heart, and (eventually) gains a Cecily.
Relationships: Cecily Alistair/Enola Holmes, Enola Holmes & Sherlock Holmes, Enola Holmes & Viscount "Tewky" Tewksbury
Comments: 16
Kudos: 28
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WingedFlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WingedFlight/gifts).



Under cover of darkness the carriage rolls through the gates and draws to a rocking halt at the front steps of Miss Harrison’s Finishing School for Young Ladies. A sleepy porter stumbles forth from the lamplit portico, followed at a more stately pace by the high, correctly-carried figure of a woman who would rather perish upright, still encased in formative casing of whalebone, than ever admit to such plebian wants and needs as _sleep_.

A slight form, full of skirt, narrow of waist and topped with a modishly minute hat, drooping slightly, is handed down from the carriage with gentle care. The rigidly upright figure bends just slightly to clasp the smaller figure’s hand with every appearance of a performance of warmth. Then she lifts her face to peer into the depths of the carriage, though whether as one near-sighted, or bereft of adequate lighting, or both, is impossible to say.

“Kindly convey my regards to Sir Eustace,” she instructs the supervising figure of some upper-servant who has just handed the smaller figure out, “and assure him that we will take very good care of our _dear_ Lady Cecily.”

With that, as the porter and the footmen jockey for control of the trunk strapped to the back of the carriage, the erect figure shepherds the smaller one out of the warm darkness of the night and into the cold, gaslit interior of the school.

~*~

_Act the First_

~*~

Gunpowder, I now know, has a shelf life. That is to say, once you have unstoppered the powderkeg it undergoes a series of chemical alterations and there will come a point in time when, following its airing to the elements, absent the application of a sequence of curative processes, the stuff will no longer go bang.

The same might be said of revolutionary feeling.

We are, as a species, profoundly inclined to the impulse. I should know this. I come from that most incendiary of alliances, a gentleman to whom society would accord every privilege and a woman of whom those same privileges society would gladly strip. I was brought up a woman in that society, and suffered all too recently the efforts of my brothers to see me moulded into the likeness of its finer females. The experience was a trying one, to say the least.

It is no wonder, I think, that Mother, of greater years spent in such society than I, began to contemplate the attraction of an inferno. Though there is yet too much in the world I desire to experience for me to see the profit in setting it all alight, I have certainly lived long enough to sympathise with the desire to strike a match or two.

Such was my inclination when I made my short-cut through an airy little park, and came upon the denizens of that establishment which my brother Mycroft had once intended should become my alma mater. Miss Harrison's School is, I have learned since leaving it, considered a very first-rate manner of establishment in its own way. While it has not been long enough established that the true nobility of our realm would send their daughters to be educated there—the notion of sending these delicate flowers beyond the sheltering walls of their ancestral homes to be educated in public, as one does a son, has been slow to attract the approbation of our staunchest traditionalists—it has nevertheless gained a degree of favour among the merchant class and the lesser landed gentry.

Miss Harrison is, after all, one of their number. She was educated at school with my mother, though you would not, on meeting them, imagine that either of these women had once shared a single formative experience in their lives, so disparate are they in philosophy and temperament and aim. But she is of like class with the highest-born of her pupils, and I think it is the sheer, stifling propriety of the woman which so inspires the confidence of those who are willing to send to her their daughters, to be moulded according to form.

It's an agreeable scheme, if you like torture.

On this day, one of London's fine and sunny few, some of the upper classwomen of Miss Harrison's school had assembled to paint pictures in the park. I might not have known it was they, or their Head Mistress she, had I not recognised at once the face of the drawing-mistress from my own brief incarceration in those walls and, on recognising her, noted some familiar structure of jawline, brow, and nasal bridge in the faces of a few pupils also. I knew these girls, and since I seldom any longer kept company with my own class and kind, I could only conclude that I must know them from that brief yet seemingly interminable stretch of time when last I had.

I am ashamed to say that a kind of panic seized me in the moment. A memory of instinct caught my limbs and I braced myself to flee the threat of capture and that interminable stifling of self and spirit which would follow, if capture were effected. It only came to me a moment later that there was no need to run.

Miss Dalrymple, the drawing-mistress, could have no interest in my recapture. She was a school teacher employed at a rate of pennies a day, and her only concern was that the some dozen girls assembled under her care would recreate, with respectable malformation and application of watercolour, the general shape of greenery and blossom which girded and sat upon the surface of the pond. If she could inspire in them sufficient focus to make a painting, re-board their omnibus and return to the school without disarranging their hair, gowns or attracting the attention of some importuning shop clerk loitering nearby, she would have put in a good day's work. Enola Holmes, freshly fed off meat pie and penny lick, bought at reduced expense and, correspondingly, reduced hygiene from a street vendor of only slightly above-average cleanliness, bound for her home in a respectable boarding house and the comfort of her bed-sit and the allure of a book which awaited her there, could be of no possible interest to Miss Dalrymple in her current state.

I relaxed, and continued on the course I had charted for myself.

I had just nearly come abreast of the group when it happened. One of the girls, a petite and slender creature whose masses of lovely, fair hair had been painstakingly captured in an upswept arrangement and secured beneath the suitable covering of a hat, reached for her palette with one hand and took up the brush with another. It was as every other girl in her group had doubtless done countless times that day since arriving in that place, and it should not have occasioned my notice, except that something of the gesture struck me as odd.

I come from a family of noticing persons. When this young lady lifted her brush, that part of my mind which says _Now, Enola, here is a thing worth marking_ pricked at me significantly, so I was obliged to slow and make a study of her.

Observing her from behind was an impediment in some ways, an advantage in others. The facial features are to our species of such instinctive significance that we can struggle to adequately survey the entirety of a person at a glance when we meet face-to-face. This young lady had her back to me, and so what I first noticed was not her face, but the set of her shoulders and the grip she made on her brush.

She was as a string wound tight and thrumming, with a tension all through her limbs that spoke to an individual held barely in check. It is true her movements were slow and deliberate, the artist’s care over the mixing of colour and the application thereof to her landscape so marked as to be a credit to her teacher, but this steady observation of her appointed ritual did not match the barely-restrained intensity of feeling betrayed in every line of her form and sinew of her musculature.

At this final thought, I surprised even myself. Why was I so much struck by the tension of the lady’s form? I am by some small way of being an artist myself, it is true, but my attention is customarily paid less to the physical shape of the being and more to those attitudes of expression, dress and like mannerism which comprise our understanding of the whole. If the young lady had been of my acquaintance I might have made much of her dainty dimity gown, the austerity of her straw boater hat and the soft, slippery quantities of heavy golden hair which defied what I imagined must be the most assiduous and aggressive attempts to corral it with pompadour and pin. She was in dress and like arrangement the human embodiment of her watercolour art: an excessive dilution of the intended image, the better to make her palatable to all who would observe and consume.

The resentment and intensity of emotion which rose up in me in response to this observation quite took me by surprise. I could not discern its origin or cause, which is very unlike my usual pattern. I am, of habit, inclination and strict training, most accustomed to understanding all origin of my instinct and emotion. To be so caught off guard by it was a rare thing indeed.

I credit this aberration of temper for being the reason I failed to discern what had first caught my eye in the lady’s form until after her teacher had marked it, and pounced.

“Again!” cried Miss Dalrymple. Her hand flew out and a chastising slap knocked the girl’s brush from her hand with such force that my own fingers seemed to smart in sympathy with hers. “Really, if your ladyship _cannot_ attend to the proper form, you will be obliged to undergo the necessary correction.”

On the word _correction_ her hand tightened meaningfully on the head of her slim bamboo walking-cane. I could not make out the young lady’s response to this, but I could not miss what her teacher did next. With short, sharp movements that spoke to extreme exasperation and irritation, Miss Dalrymple removed from the chatelaine at her waist a short cord of leather, which she used to bind the girl’s slapped hand to the frame of her easel. The brush she brandished with something close to aggression, and the girl accepted it meekly.

“Continue,” said Miss Dalrymple, and sailed on.

For my part I stood there on the path, overcome. Indeed, it took me a moment to even notice that I was shaking. She _dared_! What offence, what crime, could the girl possibly have been imagined to commit . . .

Oh.

I marked, later than Miss Dalrymple had done, the way that this correction of attitude had forced the young lady to adopt a style which mimicked perfectly that of the other girls. Whereas now she painted in like form, she had until moments before held a posture of mirror image: she had been painting with her left hand.

It is, of course, known that left-handedness has been linked by some physicians to pathological behaviour, inordinate criminality and other forms of brutal misconduct, but I have learned through my mother’s instruction that such views are more likely to be rooted in fashion and mode than any truly replicable science. Certainly the delicate figure standing before me, brutally tethered to her easel and suffering the indignity of her own bondage with far greater poise and grace than her innocent affliction had engendered in her tutrix, seemed to bear little signs of being a hardened criminal type. I, right handed and right minded though I am, was in that moment far more perilously close to an act of vengeful brutality than she.

Inspired to pity and rash compassion at the sight of her imprisonment, I left the safety of the well-travelled path and ventured across the lawn to stand at her side.

“I beg your pardon,” I said, “but would you like me to set you free?”

She leaped, poor girl, and well she might. I am not the usual sort of leering figure which most readily encroaches on a young lady in the park to molest and importune them, but neither was I in my appearance the sort of person which inspires no disquiet at all. Today, having recently launched a modest investigation on behalf of the tearful wife of a shop clerk who suspected her husband of having fallen in with some truly fearsome anarchist sorts, I had garbed myself in accordance with the custom of girls who work in shops, with a skirt that did not trail and a hat that was too modish to be deemed correctly modest. I was further tarted up with the application of face rouge, very fast and unseemly for a gentlewoman of any age, and my ear bobs owed more to the allure of their sparkle than the authenticity of their stones. It is no wonder that the lady looked at me in some awe, and no little trepidation, before I hastened to explain myself further.

“Your hand, my lady.” For Miss Dalrymple would not have so addressed her, were she not. “If I might be permitted to free it . . ?”

“Oh.” The young lady turned her gaze upon the dainty limb so bound, and in the moment afforded me by her distraction, I made full use of the opportunity to study that part of her which had heretofore been obscured.

She was beautiful. Remarkably so. She was possessed of a full and generous mouth, which gave her a sensual appearance, and wide, bright eyes whose quickness and clarity spoke of an intelligence that was a force of strength at least equal to that of her fear. Her entire demeanour was further characterised by a kind of tremulous sensitivity which stirred me to an instinct whose name I did not know: some deep and overruling need to shelter and protect and defend. But she seemed reluctant to accept my offer of that protection, and I supposed it was not to be wondered at, for again, as I have said, my appearance was not designed at that time to inspire confidence in any girl of her class.

“I had better not,” she said. “Miss Dalrymple will only see, and scold me for undoing it.”

“Then come away,” I said, which impulse of speech I could only explain by imagining that the face rouge must have made me mad. “Let me unbind your hand and we may walk a while. If it is your wish, you need never come back. If that is not your wish you have my word that I shall restore you to the position in which I see you now, though it would gall and grieve me so to do. Only walk with me a little way, take your liberty as you find it, and if you would not continue in that state I will return you safely to your prison before she ever knows you’re gone.”

At my rash, reckless vow an expression of . . . I do not even know what. _Some_ strength of feeling lit her face, then darkened it just as fast. She had suffered, I thought, the cruelty of the illusion of hope, and then known but a moment later the truth of what it was. A lady such as this must see too plainly that she could never be _free_.

“I cannot,” she said again. “One’s hand may be unbound at one moment, and yet forever captured by the name of another. In such a case, what misery it would be to suffer the _illusion_ of freedom, only to be obliged thereafter to enter the cage once more.” She looked down at her unrestrained hand, as if it had come from another place entirely than her own body. Then she looked back up, and smiled with a forceful sadness that entirely captured my sympathy.

“But thank you. It was well meant, I am sure, and I can see that you are very kind, Miss—”

“Holmes,” I supplied. “Enola Holmes.”

Had I been in sufficient command of myself to do so, I might have wondered at giving her my true name. I was certainly not got up in the clothing of Enola Holmes, although the notion that my brother Mycroft’s much-vaunted government career—even his very name—should be in any way linked with the common, rouged-up person attempting to unbind a lady from her drawing easel was so monumentally comical that if I’d had the thought to spare for it, I would have laughed.

But I had no breath or thought to laugh, because the girl had set down her brush and pressed her fingers into mine and gave me, with perfect gentility, the privilege of her name.

“Cecily Alistair,” she said. “How do you do.”

“My lady,” I said, when at last I could marshal my tongue. And then, O cruel signs and portents, treacherous stars in their meaningless courses, Lady Cecily _smiled_. At the sight of her countenance so wreathed in a light of its own making, I knew that it was not the face rouge which had robbed me of my wits and senses.

“Are you quite certain,” I heard myself pressing her, “that the captivity of which you speak is so very beyond my power to rectify?”

Lady Cecily’s laugh was bitter and sorrowful.

“It is beyond even the power of my mother, who sought to save me from it and cost herself the comfort of our family home. She has gone away somewhere, I know not where, and likely should be forbidden even attendance at my wedding, for fear she might marshal forces to stop it. Such is the authority of arrangements made for a girl by her father, after all.” She smiled at me with simple apology, as if to make amends for so troubling me with her words.

“I am engaged to be married, you see. That the fact is loathsome to me I do not trouble to hide; that my revulsion carries no weight in the matter, I also see no profit in concealing. You see, Miss Holmes, even were I to leave with you now, I should be as engaged to be married tomorrow as I am today, so why tempt myself with the promise of liberty that can never be mine?”

It was the sort of speech that might as well have been fit for a path to the gallows as the altar, and I was sorry to hear it. Indeed it made my chest burn and ache with a desire to offer succour. But I could hardly unbind the girl and force her to come away against her will in broad daylight, so there was little for it but to accept, at least for now, that she would have none of my rescue effort so offered.

“As you would have it, my lady,” I said at last, my voice faint and quite remote, “but I would take you away from it, if I could.” And on this presumption I turned to take _myself_ away from that place. For I could no more readily enjoy walking through the London Zoo and its unnatural pavements of concrete and stone, so unlike the fresh grass and good earth to which those beasts are best accustomed, than I could stand by and behold this most artistic and sensitive person bound to her creative implements, and her life unwillingly to that of another, like a drudge.

I was on the verge of passing out of sight when some impulse seized me, and I turned to avail myself of one final glimpse of the little figure at the easel.

She was as I had left her, but she was not alone. A figure clad in the neat dark clothing of some professional person was now at her side, and not a woman, either. A man, in bowler hat, with his hand extended—even I, not always given to propriety as society knows it, was shocked to perceive he appeared to be touching her face. And she permitted it! Or was perhaps too cowed to cry out.

Not so Miss Dalrymple.

She, sighting the man mere moments after I, gave a cry of alarm and brandished the cane with which she had menaced the very girl who now held court with the stranger. He, so sighted, took to his heels with something a little more dignified than alarm, but not much. Miss Dalrymple did not pursue him beyond the border of the path, but rather seized upon the arm of a passing policeman and gesticulated emphatically in the wake of the man, clearly endeavouring to communicate to him that one of her charges had been importuned by a ne’er-do-well, and she expected him to do something about it.

I lost interest in the man directly he disappeared—his type are as common as flies on days like these—but my attention did linger on the face of Lady Cecily. She looked oddly blank, and unfocused. Staring at a spot where there was nothing to see, as if she knew not where she stood.

The sight of her so transfixed, and so unattended by the very person whose job it was to keep her safe—Miss Dalrymple still sought to marshal her policeman, but made no effort to enquire after Lady Cecily herself—worked a very deep and powerful emotion in me, and I made up my mind in that moment: Lady Cecily was no more a fit candidate for education at Miss Harrison’s school nor a willing candidate for matrimony than I had been, and I would do everything in my power to free her from the menace of both.

~*~

It is not, I should make plain to you now, my custom to take residence with my brother Sherlock. Nevertheless it is his custom to keep a room in reserve for my use, which oddity of housekeeping was communicated to me via means no less extraordinary than the arrangement itself. An encoded message had been placed in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ , the little cipher being of a type new to me, quite elegant but uncomplicated, which decoded began _My dear wandering Ivy_. It did not, as previous such communications placed by my brother had done, purport to be from my mother, but rather informed the reader directly that he had undertaken to make me his ward and concluded with the promise that should I return to make use of it, shelter and lodging in his home would be mine.

Though undoubtedly happy news to learn I was the ward of this specific brother, and not the elder who had contrived to incarcerate me in the very institution which even now visited such intolerable abuse on the delicate person of Lady Cecily, I could not receive this message with unqualified rejoicing. I knew, of course, that shelter and lodging were not the limit of the terms as stated. Sherlock would not content himself to provide such basic necessities as that. He did not yet see me as I longed for him to, as his equal in intellect and potential partner in his profession. I had myself undertaken to establish a business arrangement as a professional perditorian, a finder of all things and persons lost or misplaced, but I did not imagine Sherlock had yet so advanced his understanding of me that he could perceive the possibility of my future career.

Instead my tenure under his roof would be that of his sister, as he imagined his sister should be. There would be a governess, no doubt, and a corset, not the useful tool of concealment, defence and protection such as I wore in my daily life but a straitlaced abomination of confinement, and with it all other manner of instruments of torture designed to choke the very life from me. These normalised implements of oppression were anathema to me, and no matter how I longed to learn the craft and character of my brother, even the chance to know him better was a poor trade for that precious freedom I had so carefully winnowed out for myself in the days since fleeing my childhood home of Ferndell Hall.

I must, no matter what he promised me, make my life its own thing and keep my brother set safely far apart.

But I also knew that such things as a corset, bespoke gowns and a qualified governess could not, by a gentleman, be got at an hour’s notice, and so I knew that to risk a few hours in the home of my brother was not equivalent to risking a lifetime there, or even a fortnight. Further to that the memory of Lady Cecily, drooping against her easel, her wrist bound and her company commandeered by that importuning scoundrel who had stepped in when I departed, stoked in me sufficient ire to render my usual prudence and calculating forethought less than usually in evidence. And so on the strength of my errand of mercy I made so bold as to present myself on my brother’s doorstep, and lift my knuckles to knock on his polished front door.

Before I could effect this gesture, the door opened and a woman garbed in finery of the best quality and type emerged. Under a veil her features bore evidence of the ravages of grief, for despite that code which so sternly enjoins that a lady should not give way to strength of emotion in any public place, it was plain she had quite recently been weeping. This was, I supposed, as I hastily made room on the step to let her pass, the type of overwrought person who might in any extremity of circumstance seek out the counsel of my brother. I could only hope he had been better able to offer her assistance than the transparent agony of her features conveyed.

With one sole, backward glance at my brother’s home, though whether that glance were of one faint and final hope or the genesis of true despair the veil prohibited that I should divine, she mounted the step of an unmarked carriage of quality that waited on the street, and vanished into its depths.

At the departure of that conveyance I marshalled my own wits in order to turn and announce to Mrs. Hudson, my brother’s very much astonished and kindly housekeeper, that she would do me a great favour if she were to inform Mr. Holmes that Miss Enola Holmes had come to call on her brother. This, at least, had the happy effect of distracting that good lady’s concern from the departing client, and focusing on this new and unexpected wonder of the hour.

I was shown up to that much cluttered and disarranged room in which my brother famously conducted his business, the very chamber from which I had previously retrieved my mother’s codebook, albeit clad in very much different garb on a different day. On that occasion I had been wrapped in the waterproof of a Cockney street seller, and had, to the slight discomfort of my own conscience, visited a deception on Mrs. Hudson in order to gain entrance. Today, however, I was dressed as I had been to meet Lady Cecily, and on being shown in to the room in that costume, and announced by Mrs. Hudson for my true self (though, by design, I very little looked it) I had the rare and considerable satisfaction of observing my brother, for a moment, at a loss for words. When he did at last find his words, they were by way of being little more than a letter.

“Tea,” he said. The word caught once in his throat before emerging in its entirety. He cleared it out noisily, and made a slight elaboration which reformed it as a request. “Tea, if you please, Mrs. Hudson.”

Mrs. Hudson nodded and smiled, at once retiring to leave me in his company.

“Enola,” he said, then broke off. He considered my costume with some evidence of alarm. His keen eye noted in it every detail such as I had intended should be seen. “Have you taken a job in a shop?”

It was, I thought, a testament to how greatly he feared such a downfall that he saw only what I wished him to see. It was a moment or two later that I saw him more fully appreciate the additions of false hair, reduction of heel in my shoe that in turn lowered me from unreasonable booted heights to that already considerable elevation of my natural form, the implement with which I had widened my nostrils, and the subtle expansion effected on my cheeks by the thin slivers of rubber inserted there.

“Not a shop,” he amended. “And not, I hope, a theatre company.”

A theatre company would be an even more ruinous environment for his sister than a shop. That he could suggest it so calmly implied he might even be making a kind of joke. I smiled politely, in case it were so.

“Hardly. I am surprised you do not mark my purpose; surely you undertake to wear a disguise yourself, from time to time.”

“From time to time I do,” he said thoughtfully, moving closer to inspect the cut of my skirt and the arrangement of my hat. My false fringe gave him some pause, I saw, and the nasal amplifier I wore caused his own nostrils to flare as if in sympathy. His gaze lingered longest on the rouge. “I am not a girl of your years and inexperience, however, so what I might disguise myself as is a figure far less likely to occasion the sort of unlikable attention that a woman dressed as yourself might draw.”

It is true that respectable girls of the working class are deplorably often set upon in the streets by young men who imagine themselves entitled to the sport of her horror, and perhaps I should have received my brother’s concern for me in the spirit that I now see it was intended, but at the time I had not the presence of mind to respond as now I might wish I had.

“I carry a dagger,” I retorted, too easily drawn, but much offended he would imagine I could not equip myself for such an eventuality.

“God help us,” said Sherlock, almost cheerfully. “I should ask to see it, but I am insufficiently fortified for the revelation. Ah!” as Mrs. Hudson returned with the tea, “just the thing. Not too early, I think?”

It was altogether too early for the meal which is called tea; farthest thing from being five o’clock, it was not yet even the noon hour. But we were, after all, a professional bachelor gentleman and his independently-established younger sister, and with none present to insist on any greater propriety than that, it seemed tea might be permissible after all. Together we went through all the necessary motions, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world that the brother who had pursued me across London might invite me to tea just hours after breakfast, and the sister who had evaded him for so long would meekly accept. I poured out, we arranged ourselves with the beverage and dainties, and it took on an almost surreal atmosphere of normalcy before Sherlock Holmes at last, with some freshness of emotional reserve, asked if he was to take my appearance in his home as a sign I had come to stay.

I forbore to look to the door, lest he take it as a cue to leap up and bar my path. Instead I looked at the tea cup that had been given to me, and calculated my reply with greatest care.

“I do not wish to dissemble to you,” I said truthfully. “I am still very much opposed to the idea of surrendering myself to your idea of what my upbringing should be.”

“I will in turn speak with equal frankness, and say that it is impossible you should undertake, at your tender years and with little to no experience of the world, to raise yourself.”

We both paused here, rhetorical daggers drawn, and each regarded the other with a wary desperation for some sign that we were not so soon reunited and already hopelessly at an impasse. Before I could consider a verbal feint, Sherlock made a bold thrust.

“I have prevailed upon Mycroft to cede the right of guardianship to me. You are named my ward in legal documentation which he has consented to sign.”

My hand, holding the teacup, trembled. It is true that not long ago I had begged Sherlock to effect this very thing, and yet, finding it accomplished, I felt only fear. Fear at what my life might become, even absent the punishing routines and strictures of a school like Miss Harrison’s. A governess might be hired, or even another school sought out. Not Miss Harrison’s, but one like it. A finishing school, where I would be gently, sweetly, completely finished off.

“You tell me this . . . why? To impress on me your right of authority? To make me understand I must yield to your demand that I stay here, with you?”

“Enola!” some expression of impatience broke across Sherlock’s countenance at my desperate parry. “No! You—for pity’s sake, Enola, _you_ came here to _me_ , did you not? I laid no trap, I did not pursue you. You presented yourself here, on my doorstep, of your own volition!”

He paused, then, and appeared to review the improbability of this sequence of events with some suspicion.

“Why?”

I had not known how much I dreaded this question until he laid it at my feet. Would he understand? Would he hear me? Would he consent to render the necessary aid? I set my teacup upon its saucer with great deliberation, and set both aside before I spoke.

“I need your help.”

It was too inflammatory a statement to deliver absent context, I saw this at once. He looked very much apprehensive, and I was forced first to reassure him that I was in no great way myself in trouble, but rather that the object of my sorrow was a young lady far more greatly afflicted than I: an enduring prisoner of Miss Harrison’s school, and a luckless object of tortures that were visited on her there.

I poured out to him my strength of feeling, my objections to the conduct I had observed, the binding of her dainty wrist to her easel’s frame, the slap and the cruelty I imagined it must signify, and recounted the girl’s own misery at declaring she was to be married. Against her will, quite plainly, and I could not bear to think it! Surely, I posited, no more could he. I entreated him in most soundly-reasoned terms to act in service of the afflicted lady and help me deliver her from torture.

Sherlock, blast his buttons, was appallingly unmoved.

“It isn’t torture, Enola. Marriage is a sound institution, or so I am told, and as to the binding of her wrist, I know it must _seem_ cruel but it’s a corrective measure. The technique is one meant to train her out of left-handedness.”

“You speak as if these traits cannot be coexistent! I know its purpose, Mother told me of such things. Children are whipped in schoolrooms, even nurseries, when they display this disposition. Its accepted practice as a corrective measure does not preclude it also being torture. The same might be said for the state of matrimony, when it is unwillingly entered into.”

Sherlock sighed, and the look came on his face as always does when he finds my rationalizations particularly trying. Truly it is his great misfortune that I am so relentlessly rational.

“I wonder that our mother took such pains to instruct you in the ways of the world, and yet did so little to prepare you to take your place in it.”

“You mean, to behave as you deem I ought? To religiously observe all manner of ritual and custom regardless of its value? You cannot at _all_ know Mother, if you could ever expect her to raise me like that. Mother did not believe that the mere existence of a tradition should engender its continuity. She taught me to question, Sherlock; she demanded that I challenge and interrogate. Surely, as a detective, you can perceive the value in that.”

The expression that altered my brother’s face in that moment would have been very affecting to anybody of lesser conviction. Indeed, even I could not help but be moved by the appearance of genuine concern on his face. Of course, he would insist on ruining it with speech.

“Enola, I perceive value in bringing you to a better understanding of the world.”

“No, you perceive value in bringing me to humble acceptance of it. Yet look at what harm the world you want me to accept, to dictate my place and position, has visited upon Lady Cecily! She has committed no crime, harmed nobody; she has not even fled her home. This should mean she is _virtuous_ , Sherlock, by every standard of this world, and yet even still she is punished for the form of her existence in it! How can you claim to see value in that?”

Sherlock, to his great credit, held his own integrity in too high an esteem to compromise it now. At my impassioned plea, my naming of the lady and her goodness in cruel conjunction with her unearned fate, I saw in the furrow of his brow and the curve of his upper lip that the notion of such a delicate creature suffering unwarranted brutality gave him almost as much discomfort as it did to me.

I say _almost_ because even discomfited, he could not stir himself to act as I knew we must. Instead, with visible regret and discomfort, he shook his head.

“Enola, this is not a situation where I could sanction action on your part.” He reached for the newspaper which lay folded on the small table beside his chair, unfolding it to the section reserved for announcements of a type most concerning to high society. “The name Lady Cecily Alistair, I will own, is familiar to me. Only consent to look here and you may see it too. An announcement was made today of her betrothal to Bramwell Merganser, son of the Baron of Merganser. He is her own cousin, it seems, and by all accounts this will be thought a good match. She has no doubt been enrolled at the school to acquire those arts which will serve her in the role she undertakes as his bride.

“One might reasonably presume that her parents have placed her in the school just as Mycroft once placed you. When a guardian acts to enrol a student, there is little that can be done against them. It will all be right and legal and perfectly aboveboard.”

“How can it be!” I cried. “For she told me herself that her own mother was not party to the scheme, and had removed herself from the family home in protest.”

Of course, I should have seen that the notion of a mother removing herself from the family home could not appeal to Sherlock. Indeed at my words some great strength of emotion seemed to pass across his face, as though he wrestled with the truth of what I said.

“Even if that is so,” he reflected, almost as if to himself, “it would be her father who is her guardian. This is usually the case. Absent confirmation that the facts are otherwise, to act in haste and remove her from there without his permission would be tantamount to abduction, even if she were to go willingly.”

“She would,” I said, recalling the expression on Lady Cecily’s face when I made her my offer of help, and the strange transfixed expression which had supplanted it after only a moment’s conversation with the man in the hat. “She would leap from the window if only she thought there was one beneath it to catch her.”

“That does not speak well to her rationality.”

“It is not her rationality which inspires me to save her!”

“No. Indeed.” And here he looked at me quite searchingly and close, as if some new aspect of my mien had only just now, after such long acquaintance, made itself known to him. Speaking in a very different tone he made a perplexing alteration of the subject.

“What have you heard from your friend in the Lords? The Marquess. Are you . . . do you remain in touch?”

I could not fathom whence this inquiry arose, but saw no reason to withhold the truth.

“We maintain an irregular correspondence, yes.”

Sherlock hesitated for an even longer stretch of time before choosing his next words.

“Is it the confines of the calendar or the content of the correspondence which colours your characterisation thereof?”

“Neither,” I said. “Or, rather, both.” But this line of inquiry was baffling, and I told him so quite frankly.

“I cannot imagine what inspires you to ask after him. He is a tolerable acquaintance when he speaks of what he knows, which he does more consistently now that I have told him he ought to. Most days I do not even think too badly of him, though he sits in a position which excludes from its ranks all women and so I cannot take him too seriously as a result.” I paused, considering my phrasing, then amended it in the interest of greatest accuracy. “Many days, in fact, I do not think of him at all.”

“Ah,” said Sherlock, and sat back in his chair with fingers steepled together, as if I had handed him the final piece to a great problem and not merely indulged his curiosity on the subject of my limited connection to the British peerage. When he saw that I remained perplexed by his asking after Tewksbury, he shook his head in the closest thing to apology of which I think him capable.

“Forgive me, Enola, it’s no matter. I had only thought—but there. I suppose I have not known you well enough for very long to think anything on the subject. Even a keen observer may, in limited circumstance, falsely assume that a complete picture exists when only incomplete data is present. Particularly if that picture agrees with his every prior assumption.” He paused again, and this time I clearly divined that he was regretting the implicit slight he had made against his own powers of observation, for he amended at once thereafter, “That is to say, very limited circumstance, indeed.”

“Indeed,” I echoed, and clasped my hands in my lap and cast my eyes down, so demure that even Miss Harrison might have considered me for readmittance and rehabilitation, had she been able to see me in that moment. Sherlock, who is not Miss Harrsion, regarded me with what can only be called active suspicion. I observed his unease with some pleasure through the veil of my lowered lashes, and counted it agreeable to find he knew me so well that my appearance of docility provoked him to something very near to alarm.

“You seem disquieted, brother,” I could not resist the temptation to cheek. “Was there anything further you wished to ask me? About Lord Tewksbury, or the Lady Cecily?”

“Even if there were,” he said with a wry twist to his mouth, “I am not sure I’ve the constitution for the answer.” He glanced at the mantel clock. “Perhaps after the mid-day meal.”

~*~

Having no intention of staying to any additional meal, but rather fully intending to flee and effect a daring rescue, I excused myself to lie down a little while. This is the sort of useful excuse which ladies find may be readily employed with men, particularly bachelor brothers who have little understanding, overall, of women. It also permitted me a glimpse of the room which I was told had been prepared and kept in anticipation of my arrival.

It was not, in fact, an unsuitable chamber. It was sparse of furnishing and devoid of true frippery, which I appreciated, as I have found such arrangements soothing to the orderly running of my mind. Additionally, there were certain items of consideration I would not have expected to see. I wondered if Mrs. Hudson had been given some licence in its preparation, for there were the softening feminine touches that I would not have imagined even a keen observer like my brother to intuit were warranted in such a place. A set of framed prints on the wall showed anatomical considerations of local flora, each correctly labelled in Latin formed in a schoolboy hand. Some early botany assignment of my brother, perhaps?

A ruffle of white eyelet daintily skirted the bright brass bed, and a very nice comb and brush set were laid out beside the basin and ewer on the wash stand. These latter niceties I made full use of, and also took advantage of the mirror above the stand to alter my appearance somewhat, ablating the rouge, unpinning the false hair (which I then secreted in the cavity of my bosom amplifier) and extracting the expander from my nostrils, thereby returning my nose to its natural Ciceronian form, all protrusion and no side-profile to speak of. I then settled on the comforter of my bed, and waited there in silent repose long enough that Sherlock could send Mrs. Hudson to peer in and return to assure him that I lay there, and slept, before leaping up to arrange the coverlet over an artistic oblong of pillows. They would pass no more than a cursory glance, but by the time anybody came to glance again, I did not expect I should be within distance for them to retrieve me.

I cannot say that I exited my bedroom window without a twinge of regret at leaving that neat, unfussy refuge behind. Of course I wished to stay. Of course I longed to reside in the home of my brother, unfit for a young lady’s experience though so many of his professional dealings were said to be. I did not care for what was seemly or right, and, all other things being equal, should have rejoiced to find myself his ward. His reputation excites me to pride in our connection, and his affection for me, when he gives himself leave to show it, gives me cause to regret all such familial affection that we necessarily lost when first my brothers ventured away.

Sherlock’s view of his role in my education differs too significantly from mine. He would not tutor me in the art of deduction; he would hire a governess who shared his views of the world and enjoin her to teach me instead. What care I for the lectures of a governess? But there was no way I yet knew by which I might persuasively communicate my views to Sherlock. He is a prisoner of his own propriety, though I would it were not so, and however unorthodox his views on the solving of crimes and deduction of circumstances might otherwise be, his views on what is right and fitting for a young lady are hopelessly unevolved.

I would have my freedom above all, and knowing that at least one young lady existed out there who would say the same, a young lady whom my brother could not at present be prevailed upon to help and so looked only to me for her rescue, inspired me to tarry not one night longer in my thoughtfully-appointed room, but to instead make good my escape.

I regretted the anguish this must bring to Sherlock, of course, as well as—should he undertake to pursue me through the city—the disruption to his professional routine, but under the circumstances I knew that it really could not be helped. He brings this on himself.

He ought to know better by now.

~*~

That afternoon, having stealthily quit the home of my guardian, I went to my lodging house to effect some necessarily alteration of my dress. I then sallied forth quite a different creature than I had been earlier that day, hired a particularly lovely carriage with the air of one accustomed to fine things, and undertook to call on Viscount Tewksbury, Marquess of Basilwether, at his place of business in the city. That I had never done so before did not seem to me any impediment against my doing it now, though it did occasion in him some brief astonishment at seeing me shown across his threshold by a clerk whose eyes nearly started from his head at such wanton impropriety, even though I had got myself done up very nicely, with smallish hat and longish train, and thought the clerk could probably have done to unwind a turn or two.

Fortunately Tewksbury is no more beholden to a sense of propriety than I.

“Enola!” he started up in transparent pleasure and welcome, so that I suffered a most inconvenient twinge of guilt at being so long away, and out of correspondence. “Why, this is a pleasure.” He cast about, visibly regretting the disarrangement of his offices. “I regret, I have no refreshment to offer . . . that is,” inspiration settled, belatedly. “Do you care for brandy?”

“Not inordinately,” I said, giving his sincere offer the courteous sincerity of a solemn declination. “In truth I believe that men drink brandy only to satisfy themselves they have a stronger constitution than women, and not because they truly care for it.”

Tewksbury blinked rapidly at this astonishing theory before his features melted into a most satisfying smile.

“You haven’t changed.” He did not sound displeased, which I found gratifying, but he did say it with a kind of reserved triumph that struck a chord. I could not let this pass.

“You say it as if you had won a bet with yourself.”

But he would not be drawn, and only shook his head with an affectionate smile.

“On the subject of Enola Holmes, I can ever be both the winner and loser of such a wager, for I have none willing to gamble against me. You are, as the saying goes, a dark horse.”

“Hmm,” I reflected, and ran my gloved fingertip over the surface of a nearby tower of books. No dust was in evidence; he had flung himself into the study of his new work, at any event. I could not fault his industry. “Perhaps if you truly hunger for such sport, you could call upon my brothers. Sherlock, if you wish to emerge the victor, and Mycroft, should you fancy the risk of loss.”

For it is a most painful truth that the brother with whom I am in greater professional sympathy seems the lesser inclined of the two to recognise my true aims and goals, whereas he who is least in sympathy with them seems to divine too clearly the nature of my intent. Curious that it should be so, but perhaps this is all part of some balancing act which means we are, for better or for worse, a family: three indivisible, complementary parts of the complicated whole.

“You are in contact with them, then? Your brothers?” Tewksbury wondered, drawing a chair out from a secluded corner and making it available for me to sit down upon. He waited until I was settled before reclaiming the chair opposite. “They have assumed custody of you? I would gladly send the brandy to them, if that’s so.”

Now it was my turn to refuse to be drawn.

“My brother Sherlock names me his ward.”

“But you refuse to be so named,” he concluded, and I felt that unfamiliar yet not unwelcome pang of regret that I had somehow found in the person of Tewksbury one who could so capably understand me, and yet one whom I knew, on a deepest and most soul-entrenching level, could never, for a hundred other reasons, be considered a suitable partner.

“I would have him name me his ward when he is equally prepared to name me his apprentice. The future he envisions for me is not the one that I would have for myself. I cannot be content to receive tutelage from a governess on the ladylike art of moulding wax flowers and arranging the real thing in a vase to perish in a day.”

“But what if you were also instructed to label them with their names,” suggested Tewksbury, “and divine all possible method of application for each, be it medicinal or . . .” he leaned forward, affecting a more sinister glower and hushed whisper to add, “mendacious.”

I could not help myself. I laughed.

“What, you would make a poisoner of me? Perhaps Lord Tewksbury is the one who should seek the supervision of a governess. Show her how to make flower arrangement and distillation of a witch’s brew more worth her pupil’s while.”

Tewksbury, with a rueful smile, acknowledged at last that such pursuits could not comprise the sum total of his days without threatening to tire the duration of even his own interests.

“You are right, Enola; there must be some variety to enliven the schoolroom. It cannot be all flora and fauna. I quite see your point.”

And again, at hearing him so willingly cede the victory to me, as though it were no cost to his masculine ego to acknowledge I had spoken truer than he, I felt that pang. For he was so very kind, and in his person was every promise of equanimable companionship. Yet between that and the memory of how I had felt when Lady Cecily spoke so hopelessly of her future in connection to an undesired other, and lifted that striking face to stare hauntedly into my own, kindling in me an heretofore unfathomable conflagration . . . there could be no comparison. I knew of no other feeling like that on Earth, and certainly had never felt such a thing in connection with the Marquess.

How dreadfully unfair, I thought, that one could not experience the warmth of such companionship and that all-consuming fire in a single person. Such a union, I thought, might even inspire rational happiness.

I wondered if my mother would agree.

All such reflection, of course, consumed but a moment of my intellectual process. By the time I had set the longing aside, Tewksbury was not even halfway through his next query.

“I do not flatter myself it can be entirely due to the pleasure of my company, so I will release you from any illusion of obligation to continue in this vein and bring you to the point: what inspires you to call on me today?”

He was, perhaps, unwilling to play the necessary social game of badinage through til tea time, and I could respect him all the more for it. Without further ado or pointless repartee, I leaned in to explain to him my position, and that of Lady Cecily.

He listened with first an expression of fond enjoyment at my recounting our meeting in the park, and laughed almost joyfully at my description of my failed attempt at a rescue, offering to unbind her wrist with no greater aim than stealing a few precious moments of her time. However by the time I came to the matter of her marriage his countenance had drawn close and grave, and when I recounted with feeling her mother’s desire to save her from such an unlucky fate, shackled to an elder brute of a cousin who could not possibly hope to be worthy of the honour that was accorded him, Tewksbury had been transported from humour, even from gravity, to something almost like silent anguish.

“Enola,” he said, then stopped. He looked down at his own hands, folded, clasped together, and shook his head. “Enola.” And this time my name was like a sigh. It made me ache anew, both for the same reason as before and also for another that I did not perfectly comprehend.

“Well?” I said, when the silence stretched to wastefulness. “Can you help?”

“Help? Enola, what could I possibly do?”

“You could do _something_ could you not? Pass a—a bill, or call for a vote or forbid him! Forbid him outright to take her for his wife. Demand that he bring her forth from her place of secretion and make her whereabouts known to her mother, at least. You are a lord, after all, the title must carry _some_ privilege must it not?”

“Enola even the Queen cannot forbid a marriage anymore. We are not living in Elizabeth’s days. If there is nothing legally wrong in it—”

“Legal! Tewksbury _how_ can it be legal? She is a child! A girl! Stolen from her mother; from one who loves her. A mere inoffensive slip of a—”

“Enola!” I had not known I had begun to gesticulate until he caught hold of my hands to avoid being struck by them. “Enola, please. It distresses you, I am sure. I can see that you . . .” His eyes searched my face, a kind of question burning there that he did not seem to know how to voice. “You are most upset. And rightly so. That a friend, even of short acquaintance, must suffer an alliance so distasteful to her . . . of course you are upset. If you were not angered by such a thing, you would no longer be Enola.”

Gently, regretfully, he released my hands and sat back in his seat.

“I have no power to effect a change. Not in time to make a difference to her. To your Lady Cecily. I could sponsor a bill naturally, of course. It is a good idea and I will make a note of it, and see what can be done to pursue the notion. But it could never be brought to pass in time to spare her this fate, and I am sorry, Enola, truly. I am sorry. But I think . . . I think you will have to let it go.”

I looked at my hands and made sure to keep very low and careful in my speech, that he might not discern the threat of my encroaching tears.

“If you think I could ever let this go, you cannot know me at all.”

“It is because I know you as well as I do that I know you will not let it go. I cannot help you in _this_ way, the way that you ask, and so this line of enquiry, as it cannot be of profit, I do entreat you to let go. But there is perhaps some good that can yet be done. Only I, in my position, am not the one to do it. You must believe me that I would act on your word if only I thought such an action could be of service in time.”

“Of course,” I agreed, and my tones were softer now that the nearest peril of tears had passed. I looked at him a moment, and thought how absurd that somebody so young and lordly and looking as if he had only stepped down from some painting by Edmund Blair Leighton could be so true a friend, and yet so useless an accomplice. I even told him so, though I took care to soften it with a smile.

“Imagine,” I marvelled, “all this lordly privilege, a title and masculine might; to be born male in our society, and a man of rank as you are, yet so unable to leap and act to effect immediate change. What good is being a man, I wonder, and having a title besides, if one cannot act to save a fair maiden from such fate?”

But Tewksbury refused to be drawn. He only smiled at me, and there was compassion in it, but pity, too. Pity such as made my chest ache, and yearn to cleave in two.

“How peculiar. I had only just happened to think to myself, what good is being Enola Holmes, abounding in wit and resourcefulness that are at least equal in their facility to that of any man’s title, if she cannot wield it in service of the same?”

He paid the compliment as if it cost him nothing, and yet in the face of his confidence in me, the enormity and import of it, so disparate from the clutching concern of my brother Sherlock and the scornful lack of faith of my brother Mycroft, I was undone. I could not speak. I could not even think. But he did not scorn me for it; only leaned in, took my hands again, and gave them the briefest squeeze.

“I will act to support you in any way I can. But I think we both know, if we are speaking in perfect frankness, that this young lady was never mine to save.” He raised my knuckles to his lips, a gesture that could have seemed a foolish and romantic piece of gallantry and yet somehow only impressed me as the gentle caress of a friend.

“Save her, Enola. And when the deed is done, I swear, you will only hear me say that I knew you would.”


	2. Chapter 2

~*~

_Act the Second_

~*~

I had never dreamed that I might willingly return to Miss Harrison’s school, but then I had never dreamed I might be obliged to do so in service of a young lady in peril. Peril, at least, of the mind, if not of the flesh itself. And as one who so values the orderly function of the mind, is it any wonder that I should perceive her danger as so dreadfully great? Once I knew the need was there it became a remarkably simple and straightforward thing to decide I must garb myself in dark, soft clothing that would not catch or much reflect the light, to bind my hair up in a smothering dark cloth and, after careful consideration of those options most readily available to me, hire a small cart and most obstinate pony from a livery of middling repute.

The let of the pony was mine for a night, which was, I thought, more time than it would take to effect the rescue of a girl so cruelly imprisoned. The pony being obstinate did add some needless minutes to my journey as I undertook to persuade him of the necessity of obedience. The irony of my being only marginally more successful in this endeavour than my brothers had heretofore been in communicating similar instruction to me did not, I assure you, escape my notice, but I preferred not to dwell on it as I made my journey out of the city into the more placid streets of London suburbs and thence, as night began to fall, to the outskirts of the suburbs themselves, where Miss Harrison’s establishment lay.

I wondered at the girls coming so far into the city to take instruction in the art of watercolour painting when such natural beauty lay in abundance all around them here, but then, perhaps it is considered more seemly to partake of the nature groomed and tended in a well moderated city park than less governed a sort of nature as exists in pastoral fields. Perhaps, I thought, guiding my pony off the path to a place of shadow and seclusion, which inspired him to piously strike an honest course directly back onto it, now that he knew I wished to steer him off, I could ask Lady Cecily as to the rationale of the choice of the park. She might not know, but speculation on the topic would make for suitable and diverting conversation on our journey back to town.

Having at last persuaded the pony that he could come to no great harm if he would agree to shelter under a hedge of some stout and sturdy plant, and having tethered his lead rein to that same plant and carefully applied the carriage brake besides, I slipped as quiet and carefully as could be managed around the side of the school to the bank of windows which I knew belonged to the better class of boarding girls.

I had not in perfect truth known how to go about discerning which window was the one I sought—one could hardly fling pebbles with abandon, unless the mentality which guided one’s rescue effort was less One Particular Girl and more Any Girl Will Do—but as it so happened, the difficulty of divining which window was that of the chamber of Lady Cecily proved not to exist. For directly I rounded the corner I saw a heavy gardening ladder abutted the building, its uppermost rungs placed below one casement whose sash had been raised—and not partially, which at night is quite healthful in a sleeping-chamber and very much the accepted practice among the educated classes. No, this window was fully opened, so wide and high as to easily permit the admittance of even my gawky form . . . or, indeed, the egress of one much daintier.

As, it proved, it had done.

For the window of Lady Cecily’s chamber framed a lamplit tableau of high drama. Miss Harrison herself, her rigid profile unmistakable even at this distance, marshalled some command of these proceedings, but I could divine in the domed helmet of two other figures who moved about within that Law and Order had been summoned to the scene, and a certain degree of civilised conflict had arisen as to the correct hierarchy of wills arranged therein.

No similar jockeying for position was evinced among the pack of schoolgirls I saw clustered in a fury of curiosity at adjacent windows, faces pressed to the glass as they endeavoured to overhear whatever melodrama was unfolding in that one brightly-lit room that served as centre stage. Some calamity, I divined, had unfolded here, and to assume that it had involved Lady Cecily was so clearly my first instinct I should have wondered at it, if I’d only had the time. Instead, a cry went up from somewhere to my left, near the front door of the school.

“Down here! I found her!”

There ensued the sound of footsteps running rapidly in my direction, giving me only moments to make up my mind as to the most advisable course of action. I might run, and even elude him. I wore stout boots with a low heel, as I had come prepared to climb, and these would also permit me to flee with some hope of success. If successful in my initial flight I could achieve the cart and pony, at least, but given the established temperament of the pony I could scarcely rely on his willingness to be immediately turned on a narrow road and sent galloping away into the dark.

I could, alternately, flee into the wood that surrounded the school, and endeavour to shelter myself there until the pursuit had taken itself in a different direction. But they would in the ensuing span of time no doubt discover my pony, and in returning him to the livery a connection with me—or at least, a personage who looked very much like me, as I had not undertaken to alter my physical appearance in any meaningful way—could be established. Given my existent relationship to the school, and the high probability that my brother Sherlock would learn of this escapade through some channel or other and recall my impassioned interest in the welfare of one unlucky captive of this institution, it seemed unlikely that my name would not soon be known as that of the person who had stood below the window, as I stood there even now.

These thoughts, of course, did not arrange themselves in my head in the same shining order in which I have undertaken to present them here. They came instead as a burst of instinct and hesitation remorselessly intertwined, interlocked and overlapping and besieging me with unhelpful panic and hesitation by turns, until the moment that I did decide to run, without purpose or aim, and in attempting to flee he who was my pursuer I missed the stout fellow in dark blue serge who had come out of some other door in the other direction in answer to the first man’s call.

A moment later I was caught, held fast, and no amount of twisting this way or turning that could break the unelegant embrace in which the constable held me, for in defence of my person I must rely on the accessibility of my weapons and the fluid movement of my opponent, and from the stout iron strength of him I inferred this was not a man much given to fluid movement, but rather steadfast, stalwart immobility.

He certainly held me immobile enough.

“‘Ere now, ‘ere now,” he said, not unkindly. “Calm yourself lass, there’s a good girl. We were wondering where you’d gone. Sneaked hout to meet the byfriend, I shouldn’t wonder? Young lydees is all alike in their hown way, an’ no mistake, no matter what the ‘ead Mistress might say.”

I was not so surrendered to my vexation at being caught (and marched back inside the school I had recently gone to certain pains, with some assistance, to escape) that the significance of these remarks escaped me.

They imagined the girl who fled—Lady Cecily, surely. I had as yet no firm evidence of the fact, but all my thoughts were so attuned to that lady it seemed impossible the individual they sought could not be she whom I shought also—had gone away of her own volition? They did not seek an abductor, then, but the direction the girl had taken. To meet a beau? Certainly it was possible, I had to own it. But somehow it did not seem likely that the girl so surrendered to the slim cord which bound her to her easel might seize unflinchingly on a chance to descend a ladder pushed up against her window at night. I myself had come at least half prepared to be sent away, though hopefully not forbade to return, and prevail upon her through visits paid over a course of weeks, if not months, to understand that other types of freedom might be obtained if she should so desire.

Perhaps, I reflected, as the solid mass of British constabulary helped me up step over slippery step, ascending to the bedroom wing and down the gaslit corridor lined with narrow, numbered doors, out of which flashed wide eyes and tips of noses and bits of rag-bound curl as their many inhabitants endeavoured to espy one of their number recaptured and returned to the safety of her bed, it was not Lady Cecily they sought after all. Perhaps there had been a bolder girl held here, and she, not Lady Cecily, had been the one to make good her escape. Perhaps even now, one of the girls who sought to steal a glimpse of me, my head-scarf much disarranged by such firm, no-nonsense handling and my face hot and no doubt flushed from the force of struggling to escape the same, was Lady Cecily herself, and if only I could contrive to find her, I might explain—

Before the completion of this adapted plan could order itself in my mind, the constable achieved the open door of the room whose activity I had observed from the ground outside. A tall man of some apparent authority and a constable of none were present, as was a distraught chamber maid whose sole contribution to the proceedings seemed to be to arrange herself in the corner of the room, her apron pressed to her face, and weep. None of these, however, were of as much importance to me as the fourth figure, an over rigid form clad in black bombazine and drawn upright with the alarm that came of finding one might not, in fact, have the final say in a situation after all.

She turned gladly at my arrival, an expression of open relief softening her features as I had never once seen them, only to have them re-form themselves into a far more familiar expression of outraged fury a moment later when she beheld the identity of my captor’s captive.

“Enola!” she said. “Enola Holmes, what in the name of—” But she broke off, her pantheon of private religious observance doubtless failing in the provision of a deity or sacred object suitable for the strength of petition she would need to make in seeking to discern the whims of her most disappointing pupil.

Instead she looked at the man who held me, and said, “Well don’t just stand there like a lummox; every young lady in the building must have had her eyeful by now. Bring her in and set her down. I cannot imagine what this is about.”

“Here, now,” frowned the police-type gentleman who seemed to have something to do with it all, “I thought you said her name was Cecily.”

Here, at last, was my confirmation that their quarry was my own. Such was my satisfaction at being proved correct, I did not even make feint to flee when the constable jostled me over to the bed and set me, not unkindly, on the edge of it.

“There now,” he said, with some pleasure. “Back safe an’ sound, as you should be.”

He could not possibly know how incorrect he was on every relevant point, so I did not resent the inaccuracy of the statement or even trouble to correct him. Instead I took the opportunity to examine the room itself.

Lady Cecily clearly warranted residence in the upper-end of sleeping chambers made available to the boarding students, for during the course of my tenure I certainly had not enjoyed access to anything half as nice. There was a very fine, neat bed—the same bed on which I had been placed—that boasted linens of some warmth and quality. A pretty green chair was drawn up before the hearth, where the fire itself had gone out almost to embers, but the heat it still radiated was, in conjunction with the presence of so many active bodies in a space so close, quite sufficient to render the chamber cosy and warm. A few insipid watercolours of the type the morning’s art class had been endeavouring to produce hung in neat frames on the pretty papered walls, and in all I could not fault the room for being a very pleasant version of its kind. Similar, in fact, to the sort of room my brother Sherlock had contrived to arrange for me in his own home. A bit colourless, and lacking in evidence of the intended resident’s personality, but not unlikable or unlovely all the same.

In a word, _safe_.

But Lady Cecily, it seemed, was no readier than I to content herself with _safe_ and at deducing this facet of her personality my feeling for her, already unaccountably friendly for so brief an acquaintance, greatly warmed.

“ . . . _not_ the girl we’re looking for?” the police-type man with the most authority was saying, with the air of one endeavouring to flatten his mounting disbelief. “What is she, then, _another_ of your students here?”

His meaning was so clearly to ask, without actually asking, if Miss Harrison was _this_ much in the habit of misplacing her charges that Miss Harrison’s normally sallow, aristocratic pallor warmed and grew quite high with the strength of her choler.

“Miss Holmes was briefly a pupil at my school,” she said stiffly. “Her tenure here came to a _most_ ignominious end.” A narrow, darting glance found me out, as if she wished to find some way that she might also blame me for the latest abdication of one of her young ladies-to-be. It would be quite soothing, I saw, for her to be able to lay all blame for this miserable turn of circumstance at the feet of she who had so recently engineered another.

I smiled, pure womanly sympathy, and clasped my hands in that very same way she had so despaired of me ever being willing to learn.

“Miss Harrison,” I said, “you _remember_ me. I am most gratified to know it.”

It is the sorriest of tricks, to affect good manners in the face of one whose ire is so high they are incapable of responding in kind, but I could not resist. I had already been thwarted in my own plans for Lady Cecily, whom I had longed to draw out into freedom as I had drawn myself, so to find another whose plans were, though diametrically opposed to my own, no less thwarted, seemed like a kind of release-valve for the pressure of disappointment building within.

Miss Harrison found her own release valve, much handier and less drawing-room approved, when she stepped forward to seize me by the shoulders and give me such a shake as to rattle my teeth.

“If I discover you have done this thing—” she began, low and ominous.

The police in the room stirred uneasily, as if they were not entirely certain whose side to take in this altercation. Had I been her pupil they would have gladly taken her part, but her own admission that I was no longer under her charge made the right of the thing a trifle less clear.

“Ho, ‘ere now, Missus,” said my own fetching-in Constable with some doubt. “I don’t rightly know as . . .”

“Holmes,” said the higher-ranking man, suddenly. The name and its import had only clearly just penetrated the kidnapping-shaped problem that occupied the foremost part of his mind. “No relation to—”

“Her brother,” said Miss Harrison, at the same moment as I said,

“My brother. _And_ my guardian,” I added, glancing up at Miss Harrison, whose hands still bit into the shoulders of my black creeping-in-the-darkness costume, and which, I saw, made me not look entirely unlike Miss Harrison herself. Goodness, what an uncomfortable revelation. I took some pleasure in giving Miss Harrison a revelation in kind. “Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” I clarified, for emphasis, “is my elder brother and my legal guardian. I am sure he would be very glad if you would notify him that I am here. He is bound to have been looking for me since midday.”

~*~

Sherlock Holmes came to collect me himself. Not at the police station, as I had imagined would be the case, but actually at the school, for Miss Harrison had quite got it into her head that I was responsible for the disappearance of Lady Cecily and would not permit that I be removed from the place until I disclosed to her the location of the girl’s hiding place. For my part I steadfastly maintained my innocence, and inquired how she imagined I might even have met Lady Cecily, since I could recall no classmate of that name from my time in her school.

“Indeed,” I said, far too sweetly for her to imagine I meant it as anything other than just as she would take it, “I do not recall any pupil having an actual title at the time that I was here. She must be _quite_ outside your usual class of student, Miss Harrison. No wonder you are affected by such an agony of conscience. Whatever can her parents be likely to say, when they learn you could not keep her safe?”

I quite see it was her own manner of revenge which then insisted that I be held and questioned, and not turned over into the care of my brother until I revealed what I had done with the girl. The gambit was doomed to fail, however, for the police had all to a man taken it into their heads that Lady Cecily had gone off with a beau. The idea that a lanky, spindly young woman with my accent and facial features might have played the part of a gay deceiver was so beyond their realm of experience they simply could not allow that it might even have been true. A man in my position, of course, even if he were of my class, would have undergone much harsher scrutiny. A man might be suspected of anything, where a delicate blossom of English girlhood was concerned, but a gawky squire’s daughter, though she might be guilty of impropriety and even Suffragist ideals, could hardly be cast in the role of a young lady’s ruiner.

I intended to play this blind spot on their part to the hilt.

Even the arrival of my brother, though it must necessarily mean capture and at least temporary return to the home I had that very day undertaken to flee, was not unwelcome, for his reputation at that time was such that every policeman accorded him a kind of marked, careful respect that would not have been warranted by virtue of his class alone. I think Miss Harrison would have preferred to receive him in her study, but she was too busy questioning me for the porter to risk enquiring as to the exact place he should be put, and so instead showed him directly into Lady Cecily’s room.

I saw him before she did. Her back was to the door, and she was asking me yet again if I knew what Sir Eustace Alistair could have done to me if it were discovered I had endangered his eldest child. My gaze had flitted, for what seemed like the dozenth-to-a hundredth time, across the dainty sketches that adorned the wall, blurred pastels and slightly less-malformed watercolours, but was arrested at the sound of his step.

He came through the door with the air of one who has arrived only a little late to the meeting, and expects that all present will accept his excuses. His own eye, I saw, cast rapidly over the scene, resting longest on the open window before coming to rest, with finality, on me.

“So this is how you spend your evenings,” he said. “Paying a call on your former Head Mistress. And has your time been instructive, Enola?”

I could not help myself.

“I learned all I cared to know in the first five minutes. In common with my previous tenure, the rest has been a waste of my time.”

The impudence would have earned me a slap had any less of an audience been in attendance, but Sherlock’s presence stayed her hand. Instead Miss Harrison stood back, breathing quite heavily for a woman so corseted, and said,

“Mr. Holmes. How good of you to come. It seems your sister has made off with one of my pupils. I would ask you to impress upon her the grave importance of acting to send her back.”

“Indeed.” Sherlock made no more committal response than this until he had crossed to the window and looked out, and down. “My goodness. Such a height. The child left by way of her window, you think?”

“Why of course,” said Miss Harrison, indignant. “Any other path should have alerted the porters, the maids, and myself at once. The girls, once here, are _quite_ protected, Mr. Holmes. None may pass but that I know of it.”

“Surely,” said Sherlock, tapping his gloves thoughtfully in the hollow of his palm “you meant to say _almost_ none.” And then, to my unending shock and surprise, he glanced sideways at me and _winked_. Really winked! I should have doubted my own eyes but that a smile followed, the merest twist at the corner of his mouth, before his expression smoothed into implacability once more and he turned to face Miss Harrison head on.

She, quite out of temper at having been already cheeked by one of my family tonight, was ill prepared to face such levity from a second Holmes.

“Your sister, Mr. Holmes,” she said stiffly, “effected her escape with the help of another.”

“I do not recall specifying that the escape of which I spoke was that of my sister,” said Sherlock. “Are we not all gathered here even now because you have lost another pupil tonight? Enola is no longer in your charge, and so her antics here tonight are answerable by me. It is the young Lady Cecily whose disappearance with which you concern yourself now, is it not?”

He paused, looking around, as if much struck by some facet of the scene which had not struck him before.

“I heard you speak his name as I entered, but I do wonder that Sir Eustace is not already here.”

Miss Harrison’s entire countenance at this became a colour which I can only describe as _bruised_. Her cheeks and neck turned a deep, mottled red-purple, such as the tip of a thumb that had become hopelessly bound up in string. My brother’s words had seemed to have the same effect on her as would her own collar made three sizes too tight.

“It would not do,” she said, “to alarm him until more about the disappearance is known.”

“Ah,” he said, understanding. “I quite see your point. However, not having been privy to your perspective on the matter when first the telegram reached me, I regret that I made so bold as to communicate with the Alistair household myself. My sister, you know, could not possibly have been the abductor of your Lady Cecily, and if you do not yet see why, though I saw it directly I arrived at the school, I shall reserve my communication until such time as I am able to express it directly to the young lady’s parent. One guardian to another.”

He smiled. It was a professional smile, without warmth or humour, and I confess I thrilled to see it. He had the whip hand of Miss Harrison, and I relished the knowledge as surely as she must have quailed at it.

“I fully expect at any moment that . . . yes, indeed,” his gaze dropped to the open window, moments before the distant clip-clop of hooves drifted up, “he has arrived.”

~*~

There comes a point in any parlour drama where the thing will descend to unchecked comedy if a decent veil is not drawn over some portion of the proceedings. I quite understand that. In filling the role of my own biographer it is of paramount importance to me not to romanticise or lionise any aspect of my existence save, perhaps, that of my most driving ambition to remain that one thing that my brothers would deny: a woman at liberty and in perfect command of her own affairs.

I assure you that I well understood, as I was escorted down to Miss Harrison’s office by my brother, Miss Harrison, and four representatives of the local police force, the peril in which the entire situation stood of unravelling into pure farce. Of course I was no more Lady Cecily’s abductor than Miss Harrison herself—which is to say, I’d had some notion of a plan for the girl which may or may not have agreed with the plan she had for herself, but before it could be acted upon she had vanished, by means and to quarters as yet unknown. So to be regarded as the chief suspect in the affair was a development so absurd I could not help but feel this were one circumstance best elided in my recount of affairs. I do desire to omit as much of it as I can for that reason, and that reason only, but if I omit this chapter altogether I should struggle to communicate the understanding I in that time gained of Sir Eustace Alistair, and how he regarded the affairs of his daughter.

We were scarcely in the office a minute or two before Sir Eustace joined us. He proved a certain type of man which may be familiar to those raised in circumstances not unlike my own: square of shoulder, beginning to soften around the middle, with features I should not have struggled to call handsome if they had only been drawn in something softer than a most thunderous scowl. But this, I reminded myself, was only to be expected under the circumstances.

Certainly his expression unknit slightly as he surveyed those present, and seemed to categorise us each as having some right of presence, though unsurprisingly his gaze did light and linger longest on my face—or perhaps it was my hair, uncovered and a little unbound, which occasioned his notice. However it was to Miss Harrison that he first addressed himself, demanding to know the meaning of an alarming communication he had received not an hour ago, purporting to be from none other than Sherlock Holmes himself and enjoining Sir Eustace to come at once to the school, that he might shed all possible light on the disappearance of his daughter.

Miss Harrison at once took great pains to assure Sir Eustace she had authorised no such communication be sent, which you may well imagine did nothing to soothe the man.

“A hoax, is it?” he said, and looked speculatively at my brother where he stood. “I am not so altogether lost to the grand affairs of my exalted position that I fail to notice a thing or two. I do know, as well as any man in this city may do, the name and face of Sherlock Holmes. Is this not before me the very man whose name was set to the thing?”

“Well—yes,” stammered Miss Harrison, seeing too late the trap into which she had permitted her own foot to fall. “But it was not I who bade him send it.”

“No?” Sir Eustace turned on her with truly terrible coldness. “Then assure me, Miss Harrison, that Cecily is abed and asleep as she should be at this hour. Put my mind easy that I have been led from my comfortable home on nothing more than a wild goose chase.”

This, of course, Miss Harrison was obliged to confess was not at all the case. To deny that her transparent discomfort in so doing gave me pleasure would be to deceive you, and so I will only say that I strove to moderate my facial muscles so as to betray as little of my own enjoyment as possible. Sherlock, I thought, was possibly undeceived, but he was attending too carefully to the exchange between parent and Head Mistress to give me any sign.

“Then pray tell, Madam,” Sir Eustace said with most terrible coldness, “if my daughter is spirited away from this place, and I am obliged to learn of her ignominious disappearance by way of word sent by a man who is _not_ contracted by you to retrieve her _quietly_ , and without any _breath_ of impropriety attaching itself to her good name, when _exactly_ did you ordain that I should hear of it from _you_?”

His emphasis of these words was rich with menace and contempt. In this, I think I must make plain, his breeding was showing, and not in a favourable way. Men may, of course, give way to temper and even men of great standing are known sometimes so to do, but it is considered a sort of low thing to so directly degrade a woman of standing, and Miss Harrison was a woman of some standing, though of course she was also the woman who had misplaced Sir Eustace’s daughter.

Sherlock, at my side, stirred. Sir Eustace turned to look at him, and in so doing appeared to realise for the first time that the other men who stood with us were not unusually well-uniformed porters, but actual officers of the law.

“And police!” he said, as though he had just discovered that the school had rats. “Police, and what next? Reporters? Is my daughter’s reputation to be thus polluted? She was sent here as a safeguard to her good name, Miss Harrison, and yet I arrive in the dead of night to learn that you contrive to ruin it with all speed!”

Before Miss Harrison could muster some rejoinder to this perhaps unjust remark—whatever the woman’s many character failings, I could not see her advancing the cause of an abductor of one of her own pupils, on her own grounds—Sir Eustace turned to scrutinise my brother. Sherlock appeared unbothered to be the object of such scrutiny, but merely met the man’s gaze steadily until, with a sound that can only be described as a _harrumph_ , Sir Eustace appeared to reach a decision.

“If a man wanted to engage you, Sir, he could be assured of your discretion?”

“Perfectly, Sir Eustace.”

I do not think it was my brother’s reply that won the baronet over so much as his accent. My brother and I, when not affecting some disguise or other, speak exactly as what we are: the educated lesser gentry of England. There is a confidence that cannot be bought which is conveyed by that accent, and though I might here digress into a treatise on the folly of trusting a person based on the shape of his vowels and not the content of his character, I must confess that in this instance, at least, it proved fruitful. Sir Eustace proposed to engage my brother on the spot, and Sherlock caused me very mixed emotions by declining this offer. He then at once took pains to clarify, with much correctness of manner, that although he could not accept the commission itself, by virtue of his own previous entanglements with the matter—he here laid a hand gently on my shoulder, as if to indicate I was an entanglement of their number—he already considered himself personally interested, and would gladly consent to provide, uncontracted, such self-directed service as he was capable.

It was a handsome speech, finely worded in every regard. I perceived Sir Eustace was much struck, as, indeed, was I. But I was worried.

Of course I wanted Lady Cecily found if she were in need of rescue, and out of danger if she had fallen into it. But I could not help thinking she might have gone away as she did simply because she _wished_ to go. That very day I myself had put up a window sash and climbed over the sill, had I not? Perhaps Lady Cecily had done the same. Perhaps being confined to a school by a father who seemed as much beset with concern for the ignominy and impropriety of her disappearance as he was the actual danger had inspired her to flee school, father and fiancé alike, and make her own life for herself.

If it were so, I would not for the world have stood in her way. But how to ascertain the truth?

I was still mulling this problem over when Sherlock declared he would like to examine the young lady’s chamber more closely. He touched the back of my chair and said, “Enola, I would like you to accompany me.”

I was already on my feet before Miss Harrison found her tongue and said that surely I could be of no aid to him there. Sherlock turned what I was coming to think of as his _office_ face on her, and smiled blandly.

“I will remind you,” he said, “that when last she was in your sole charge, she did not remain in it for long. Perhaps in taking her with me I simply seek to forestall a second such escape.”

Then he gestured that I should precede him from the room, and so pleased was I at seeing my erstwhile jailor so routed and robbed of speech that I did not even spoil the effect by telling all present that Sherlock Holmes himself had only managed to keep me in his custody for all of a day before losing me, too—in fact, he had already lost me twice.

~*~

Sir Eustace accompanied us as far as the door of his daughter’s room. I was sent inside to wait while he and my brother held counsel in the corridor, conversing in low and rumbling tones for some minutes before Sherlock followed me inside. I was waiting, of course, exactly where he had sent me. Not for the world would I have missed the chance to investigate a scene with my brother, nor solve the disappearance of Lady Cecily. That I had the chance to do _both_ seemed like a gift.

“Do any features of the case yet strike you?” Sherlock asked, and for a moment I feared he might be mocking me, but no. He was crouched to examine some footwear placed in the bottom of the wardrobe, and seemed for all the world to seek my insight on the matter. I could hardly believe it.

“The chamber maid found her missing,” I said slowly. “So she must have been seen at evening prayer, or Miss Harrison would have marked the absence.”

Sherlock looked over his shoulder. “You heard them say this when they were with you in the room?”

“No.” I indicated the now-cold hearth. “The chamber maid was here, weeping, when I was brought in. The fire was low. She had not built it up; she must have entered to do so, and on entering determined that Lady Cecily was no longer in residence.”

“Is it the custom in these schools for the maids to build up fires when the girls are in their rooms?”

The moment Sherlock asked as much, I quite saw his point; usually a maid will attempt to do any very untidy work when the inhabitant of the room is out of it, and fires are most often laid before an occupant returns so that the room is warm on her arrival. I cast my mind back, seeking memory of my own time here, and could not recall an instance when the maid had been in the room to perform this task.

“How peculiar,” I said. “Come to that, by the time the disappearance was noted, Lady Cecily should already have been in her bed.”

“Indeed.” Sherlock leaped to his feet and advanced on the hearth, surveying it thoughtfully. “So why, then, did the maid enter when she did?”

I reviewed all possible manner of reasons in haste.

“The maid might have been behind in her schedule, and knew which rooms to leave for last as their occupants would be least likely to air their grievances.”

Sherlock cast me a sidelong glance at this. “Lady Cecily, you think, would be unlikely to give her a poor character to Miss Harrison.”

I nodded feelingly. “I should be very surprised to discover she had.”

“That does agree,” said Sherlock, almost to himself, “with something that was said. Apparently there was a _mesalliance_ , or at least an unfortunate connection with a shopkeeper’s son. A clerk. Someone she met while out walking in the park. He was the true reason Sir Eustace installed her here, and acted in such haste to effect the engagement.” He tapped the mantel, and surveyed the room with some thought. “Perhaps an elopement?”

“Unlikely. She has gone away in her night things,” I said, and in so doing drew his focus, with much surprise.

“Whyever do you say so?”

“Her wardrobe, of course.” I pointed to the doors, which he had left ajar. “Three school gowns, regulation use. A boarding student is thereafter permitted only four gowns of particular type and style, to be worn under certain circumstances, and I perceive that all four such gowns, _and_ her travelling clothes, are present and accounted for. You will also find five school collars in the lower drawer of that wardrobe, which is _not_ a guess,” for I saw doubt flicker across his face, “but a deduction. No young lady off to meet her beau would wear one of those dreadful things for the occasion. They do _nothing_ for the face.”

Instead of his doubt, I was rewarded with a smile. He turned to survey the contents of the wardrobe as one who has just been confronted with hieroglyphs, and had placed in his hand a true Rosetta Stone.

“Marvellous,” he said, almost to himself. “Quite ingenious.”

He looked again to the window.

“The chamber maid—weeping, you said?”

“Prodigiously.”

“Affecting. Were they friendly? Sir Eustace does not seem the type of man to condone his child’s friendship with a servant, but perhaps the girl is of a more democratic turn of mind than the sire.”

“She conversed with me unaffectedly in the park,” I recalled. “I was not dressed as one of my station, but it seemed to give her no real pause even then.”

“And there is the shopkeeper’s son,” Sherlock added. “So it might be that they were on friendly terms. Or it is perhaps a manifestation of the maid’s own guilt. There are no signs of struggle and, I infer, no report of a cry.”

“Perhaps a sedative?” I wondered, but could not infuse the suggestion with much confidence. “Administered by the maid? Though, it does not stand to reason. The ladder alone speaks against it.”

“Indeed. You mark the same difficulty with the theory as I. You have seen Lady Cecily; stood near to her. Is she so slightly built?”

“She possesses a very dainty form,” I allowed. “But even the daintiest girl of my years, carried over the shoulder as a deadweight . . .”

“Just so. She would be a burden, and the very act would carry much risk. If the goal is ransom, he might drop the entire fortune with one misstep and see her dashed on the cobbles. Unless the ladder was a blind . . . but to what purpose? And if she was not taken out at the window, how could the girl be carried through the corridor without attracting attention?”

I knew, of course, of one way, having myself been all but carried out in a basket, but it was true I had not been so secreted without attracting any attention at all, and I supposed that following my escape in that manner Miss Harrison would doubtless have become even more vigilant about the provenance of strange trunks large enough to conceal even a smallish young lady. The basket, I decided, was not worth mentioning.

By now Sherlock was back at the window, inspecting the ladder. At the sight of him doing so, it occurred to me to ask something I had been wondering almost since he first arrived.

“You said when you got here you knew at once I could not have taken her away.”

“I did. I still do.”

“But . . . I _meant_ to. I had come here intending to invite her to leave. Persuade her, even.” I did not say this as a confession. I felt no shame at my intent, and saw no need, now, to conceal the truth of it from my brother. Indeed he nodded, as if he had suspected something of the sort.

“Yes, I thought as much. You had a look of something out of _Ivanhoe_ about you as you went away to your room today. It aroused in me a most fearful suspicion.”

“Then, since you know that such was my intent, how can you be so confident that I was not successful?”

In answer Sherlock put his hand out the open window to rest on the uppermost rung of the ladder, which was level with the sill.

“This device is a newer patent ladder, which disassembles into four parts. More parts may be added, as required, but each part is on its own devilishly heavy. It’s the type of thing which is suitable for lifting by a stout gardener, but the assembly of the device and its precise placement in this location are, combined, assuredly a task to which you would be unequal.”

So it was the strength of the evidence, and not my established character, which had inspired Sherlock’s assertion. I could not decide if I was pleased with this or not. Then it dawned on me that if I were unequal to the task of shifting the ladder, so too would be Lady Cecily. She had not my height or sinew; there was no chance she might have arranged the ladder in secret and then placed it against the wall to aid her own escape, or to give the illusion of abduction. It must certainly have been put there by another. But who?

The unsuitable beau? Sherlock had mentioned a shopkeeper’s son. Such a young man might be equal to the assemblage of the device, but again there was the evidence of the girl’s own wardrobe. Descending in her sleeping garments lacked the air of romance that I, inexperienced in such matters though I confess myself to be, instinctively felt such an assignation must demand. So if not a willing departure (which manner of escape surely none could be in greater sympathy with than I) how came Lady Cecily to leave her room in this manner, with no sign of struggle or attempt to cry out, dressed in such an unlikely style?

I could not see my way clear to any answer, and such was my concern for the girl’s wellbeing that it was cold comfort indeed to perceive that no closer to the solution than I in that moment was the great Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself.

~*~

I stayed long enough to be present for the interview of the chamber maid, Annie, the first stage of which went exactly as well you might expect any interrogation by a great detective of a very young and tearful girl of her class to go. Sherlock could no doubt have told by a glance at Annie when last she had knelt to lay a fire, how often she laundered her clothes, the cost of the thread with which she did her mending and the type of dripping she had taken on her toast at tea, but he could not make her trust him enough to tell him the truth of the matter where Lady Cecily was concerned, for he was a grand gentleman in a fine coat and she had already been frightened half out of her wits by the stern constabulary of the local police.

They would have made her very well aware of her position, I thought. Frightened her with threats of what happened to nice young girls who abetted kidnappers, and sealed her lips with her own assumption that they would find some way to pin the crime to her if she so much as breathed the wrong way. In short, they had rendered her a most useless and sniffling witness, and I could see by the set of his shoulders that my brother’s patience was wearing thin.

It was just as well that I had not gone down the ladder when he went to send for her, but poked around the room a little in his absence, and made certain discoveries of my own with which I proposed to make my own headway. Only first I must persuade him to give me my way in the matter.

When he endeavoured and failed yet again to convince Annie to cast her mind back over Lady Cecily’s behaviour of the night before—had the young lady altered her routine in any way? Communicated to Annie a desire that she should arrive at a later hour than was her custom, or in any other manner seemed less than usual?—I set my hand on his shoulder, and cleared my throat.

“Perhaps,” I said, “you might like to bring Sir Eustace abreast of our progress in the case.”

Sherlock knew as well as I that the sound of hooves in the courtyard meant Sir Eustace had departed for the city and the comfort of his bed not a quarter of an hour ago, but he must have divined my true intention readily enough, for he said only, “Yes. Quite so,” and took his leave.

I waited until the click of the latch showed that the door was indeed fully closed. Then I smiled encouragingly at the wary, watery-eyed Annie.

“Did you pay her a commission?” I wondered. “Or was she making it for you as a present?”

I had the satisfaction of seeing Annie’s jaw drop nearly an inch from the _closed_ position. She was no hand at concealing her feelings, poor Annie. Her grief and distress had undoubtedly been genuine.

“I found it behind the other paintings.” I bent over the side of the bed and slid the charcoal portrait out from the place I had chosen to conceal it. “It is an excellent likeness. She has much talent, do you not agree?”

Annie, her gaze arrested by the striking dark lines which depicted her own features, incompletely rendered on the page, nodded. The sight of the portrait seemed to work a kind of music-hall mesmerism on her, as if now that I knew her true secret she could see no further point in keeping anything back.

“She has always been most kind,” she said softly. “Unhappy, she was, though she would not own to it. But I came in to build the morning fire one day and found her already awake. She had a piece of paper tacked up on her wardrobe and was as hard at work on it as Cook in the kitchen or my own mam at the dairy, though it were only a portrait, like, she was making.”

She put out her finger to touch the arresting, bright black eyes winking out from the page, which bore such a striking likeness to her own.

“She begged me not to tell. Was doing ‘em with her left hand, you see. It would not have been thought suitable. But it were her best hand, she told me. Sometimes folks are like that, aren’t they? I went to the Sunday school with a boy as was left handed, and they had to beat it out of him. Not that they might have beaten _her_ , here, but they could be most intolerable cruel all the same. Weights and bindings, and suchlike. She told me a bit of it, when she was making my portrait, the things that they would do to her poor dear hand.

“I didn’t _ask_ her to do it,” Annie added, as if anticipating an accusation of the kind. “Never had my portrait made, nor even thought to. She offered. Said I could make a present of it to my mam. I think she thought maybe if she made me a present I would be not as likely to tell. But I’d not have told even if she hadn’t done it. She were a kind little soul, Lady Cecily, and there was no harm in her. She could have turned me out of the room without a word, and I still wouldn’t have told.”

Annie’s fingers traced, with wonder, the lines of her own charcoal-rendered nose.

“Really is a marvel, what she could do.”

I was inclined to agree. Annie’s had only been the topmost of a sheaf of drawings that I had uncovered, having looked in one of the few places I imagined nobody searching the room had yet touched: the backs of the tired little watercolours that adorned the walls. I had once quite recently had great good fortune, looking in the backs of paintings on the walls, and so it had proved this time too. Lady Cecily had secreted an easy dozen works of impressive personal magnetism behind her far less inspired pieces, and I was close to being overcome at the force of personality which stared forth from each.

I could not leave these behind for any other to discover, and had already made up my mind to take them with me. The school, though, I fully intended to leave behind.

“You must understand,” I told Annie gently, “that Lady Cecily has so little understanding of the ways of the world, it would not be at all right to allow any gentleman to lure her away, no matter how assiduously he professed his love.”

“Oh, to be sure, Miss,” said Annie, who seemed to have quite got over her initial paralysis of the tongue now that I knew and appeared not to mind her very particular secret that she had shared with Lady Cecily. “Why, my own mam always did warn me against the type of men as would stoop so low. She read of it in the _Pall Mall Gazette_. Maiden tribute of modern Babylon, they called it, and oh, Miss, ‘tis a horrible thing! There’s men who’d take a pretty girl from the happy home of her childhood, Mam said, like it were no more to them than picking up a farthing in the gutter. She said I should on no account seek a post in the city, though the wages I could earn there would have been that much higher. Mam said the cost could well be higher still.”

I had, of course, heard something of this kind myself. Mum took a subscription to the _Gazette_ and the articles so described had occasioned much stir when published a few years ago, although, being but tender years of age at the time, I had not actually been permitted to read them. Although it is true that establishments of the kind described in the stories do exist, and the girls who enter them do so in great extremity of circumstance, Mum had always given me to understand that the publication itself was not altogether representative of the whole of the truth.

“Moral hypocrisy,” she called it. “As if noblemen do not also sell their daughters! But saying so would not affright the nice middle-class mammas as this does.”

She gave me only the crudest outline of the publication, which having lived in the city some months now I understand was quite restrained, for Mum. The trade in women and girls, she had told me, was a true problem made false for having been represented as a problem exclusive to brothels, with careful omission of the likewise abominable marriage market of England’s upper class. “See how they speak of virtue,” she seethed, “yet when she is robbed of it, they condemn the victim for her loss!” She had written a condemnatory letter to the editor on the strength of her disapproval, though she had not signed her name for she did not wish it to attract the attention of my brothers.

I thought perhaps it best not to take the time to explain all this to Annie, however; she seemed very much taken with the need to persuade me that Lady Cecily had not been in thrall to a type such as this, and the urgency had further loosened her tongue.

“He wasn’t like _that_ kind, Miss. He was a respectable man who spoke to her, though of course he was not of her station, and that was the reason her father sent her here.”

“Spoke to her?” I echoed. “Surely they must have done more than speak.” Sherlock had termed it a _mesalliance_. I had imagined there might even be a secret offer of marriage in defiance of her betrothal. But Annie was adamant matters with the young man, one Alexander Finch by name, had never progressed so far.

“He was a pleasant young man, she said, and he paid her a compliment on the book she was reading. She did not see him more than one time after that, when he thought to presume and she set him aside quite gently, but her parents learned of it from the footman who escorted her that day and her father was much aggrieved. He is very proud of his place, Lady Cecily said, and he could not abide knowing she had once been friendly to a shop clerk’s son, and even given him free use of her name so that he might call her by it when he saw her out walking. Sir Eustace was afraid she might have promised herself, you see. But Mr. Finch was not a seducer, Miss, for he did not attempt to carry her away nor put her head in a bag or give her scent to sniff or anything of the kind. He only wanted to discuss her book, and presumed a little too much on account of her good nature. He was not affronted when she put him off.”

I thanked Annie for her forthrightness and then, to safeguard her against that lecture that must surely otherwise follow, availed myself of the pretty stationery in Lady Cecily’s writing-desk to pen a brief note to Sherlock. In it I entreated him not to berate the girl for leaving me alone, for she was overwrought and imagined she must be charged with a crime of which she had no earthly knowledge. I concluded with well wishes, and the generous hope that we might meet again someday soon.

To all this I signed my own name, then blotted, folded and sealed the note, and gave it over into Annie’s care for her to take out of the room and deliver.

This left me a most rational amount of time to bundle Lady Cecily’s drawings up in a rolled sheaf, insert this with some difficulty in my bosom amplifier (which I find a really very useful cavity for the storing of various items) and put my leg over the window sill just as easily as one might sit astride a bicycle. Even in the dark it was not difficult work to find the needful rung of the ladder, and I discovered the thing held wonderfully steady even as I trusted it with the entirety of my weight. Then I descended confidently into the darkness, and thus, for the second time in my life, did I take my leave of Miss Harrison’s Finishing School for Young Ladies.

She would, I thought, like as not be very glad to have finished with _me_.

~*~

On returning to my lodging-house, having restored the obstinate pony to his masters just as the grey light of dawn was thinning the darkest part of the London smoke, I fell almost at once into a deep and impenetrable slumber. The morning passed without me having any knowledge of it at all, and by the time I woke with a fierce and undeniable pang in my belly it was almost midday, and except for a small portion of a most uninspiring root vegetable and mutton offering which had been my landlady’s idea of a dinner, I had not eaten since this time the day before. Resolving that I should kill two birds with one stone, I reapplied my disguise of the day before and ventured back into that shopping district which had bordered the park where I had first laid eyes on Lady Cecily.

Had it only been a day since I learned of her existence? It seemed an entire lifetime had come and gone. I had _changed_ since learning of her. The perusal of her artwork—her real artwork, not the stuff I had found her creating by the pond—had worked a kind of transformation on me. She _saw_ people, in a way that was not unlike the manner that I myself could see them. I am also by way of being something of an artist, and I flatter myself that my character portraits are more than usually affecting, though of late I have drawn more from life for I find it helps sharpen the mind’s understanding of what the eye has seen. Lady Cecily, too, had perhaps found her mind’s understanding of what her eye had seen, and it had affected her most powerfully. Her depiction of these sights had certainly affected me.

She drew _people_. People such as I had rarely seen them drawn, so true to life and captured frozen in a moment of the most ordinary workings of their day. By the most simplistic collection of thick lines and thin, strong strokes and fine, she brought the workers and lower classes of London to screaming smoking life on the pages before me. Dockworking men, arms bared to the elbow, pipes and stumps of cigarillos clutched between their teeth, gathered around a bearded, firebrand revolutionary of a speaker. As a fearsome and fanciful artistic touch, a shadowy stack of boxes lurked in the background, a literal powder keg awaiting only the touch of a spark to set the whole thing to blazes.

In another image a flock of little orphans, marshalled clean, neat and upright into two straight lines, trotted out before a stern-looking matron with a kind of ruffled flowerpot perched atop her head. They would grow up to be young ladies of no fortune save their character, and if even half of the _Maiden Tribute_ had been true should soon be robbed even of that, if they made but one wrong turn.

As acknowledgement to the respectable toiling masses she had captured a moon-faced young man behind a shop counter, the surface more cluttered with merchandise than the usual austere form of display, in the act of offering a writing-set to some unseen customer. The female of his type was incompletely represented too, and it was on this figure that I gazed the longest and most often. She was a shop clerk by garb, but drawn out of doors, as Lady Cecily had seen her. Her form was long and gawkish, incorrectly proportioned for all current fashion, retreating from the viewer across an expanse of manicured lawn. She carried herself as one with purpose.

My eye lingered longest on this depiction. I found it no less compelling for all that it was so clearly unfinished. The form which retreated was my own. Lady Cecily had made me know myself even from behind with just a collection of harsh, dark lines and a very moderate sweep of my skirt. She did not give me a train, and indeed that day I had worn none, but she gave me a height and bearing which I knew I had done much to consciously _not_ affect. Yet she had seen through me, my lady, and had evidently no sooner arrived back at the school than she had begun work on this image, an outline only, the setting around it only very lightly roughed in. I wondered, as I held it, when I beheld it, if I should be able to find her and perhaps even prevail upon her to finish.

Hence my return to Ebenezer Finch & Son Emporium, the shop I had visited the day before. It was a new kind of shop, the sort that would come to be known as a department store, and though it had quite offended my senses when I set foot in it yesterday I was most determined that I should return today because I had recognised in the sketches of Lady Cecily that very same shop, with bric-a-brac and oddments set out for display on the counter, and a very solicitous shop clerk leaning over the same to ply his wares.

A shopkeeper’s son, hadn’t Sherlock said?

I had been in that department store only the day before, and to judge from the subject of her sketch, Lady Cecily had been there too.

The shop was located in a district which was home to many such types, and I paused only to purchase a meat pie that would take the edge off my hunger before continuing on to the establishment itself. Upon my arrival, the plan that I had sketched out in my mind beforehand was not long in taking shape in reality.

A police constable, one of many such effecting a leisurely patrol of the area, paused in polite attention to my nervous salutation. I was, I confided in him, seeking the return of certain items an acquaintance (my awkward discretion gave the clear impression of an importuning beau, reluctant to accept the truth of his unsuitability) had spirited away, and refused to return. Would he, I wondered, very much mind waiting outside the Emporium, so as not to occasion alarm within, but be ready to answer my summons if the young man should once again refuse to return the items of trifling value but much sentimental significance? I sought most particularly a little ring, belonging to my dear dead dad, and a framed photograph wherein the value for the gentleman lay entirely in the silver, but for me in the precious maternal likeness it contained.

The constable was a young man, very earnest, and overeager in the execution of what he clearly perceived to be his professional duty in the aid of a luckless orphan like myself. He vowed he should wait outside the shop until I emerged safe and sound, or, at the passage of a quarter-hour, venture in to ask after my wellbeing. I prevailed on him to permit me twenty minutes rather than fifteen, for I was not confident of my immediately being able to find Mr. Finch. These details at last settled to my liking, I ventured into the emporium and approached the nearest counter with a fussy, fussing air.

Yesterday I had presented myself as one seeking employment, and so it seemed only natural that I might return today to enquire after the progress of my application. And indeed, though the clerk of whom I enquired did not seem brimming over with confidence at the likelihood of my having been a success on so short a wait, neither did he seem surprised that I might ask. When I delicately suggested that I might have been told to seek an audience with Mr. Alexander Finch particularly, the better to see how my odds advanced, his expression transformed into something almost like knowing boredom.

“Ah,” he said. “One of _those_ , are you?”

I might have pretended to take offence but he did not seem condemnatory; merely resigned. Certainly he got up quickly enough, presumably to take my message to whatever quarter of this most perplexing store in which Mr. Finch was to be found.

Was Mr. Finch, I wondered, so in the habit of soliciting applications from prospective shopgirls that the arrival of yet another might occasion this manner of remark? I could not work out why that might be, unless perhaps the unhealthy profusion of merchandise, so in evidence on every surface, might be said to have unhealthfully impacted the young ladies there employed so that they were obliged to leave service behind the counter at a brisk pace. This, I allowed, might well be so, for I had never beheld such a dizzying array of merchandise arranged for purchase in all my days. Gas lamps flared lustily even in the daylight hours and many smartly-dressed clerks, male and female alike, ranged throughout the store, ready to assist all purchasers in navigating the profusion of merchandise on display.

I was still attempting to regulate my mind’s absorption of such visual stimuli when a door opened somewhere overhead and a shattering bellow rolled down to the shop floor below.

“—affront to _all_ decent persons of taste! Looks like one of your anarchist mobs gone awry all over the glass! Repair the display, Sir, and render it fit for the public, or you will be here all night to correct the error!”

I looked up at once, as did, I think, a good half the custom in the shop. Through the glass-paned wall of an office, so arranged that the proprietor might keep a close eye on all happenings on the floor below, I perceived an older gentleman with an air of authority lambasting a straight-faced young man, whose hands were insolently tucked in his pockets. Except for this minor degeneracy of posture, the individual suffering this demoralising lecture made no sign of rebellion or insolence.

At the arrival of the clerk I had sent in search of him, the elder gentleman—Mr. Finch Senior, I presumed—made an impatient gesture of dismissal. On the younger Mr. Finch’s departure from the office I rapidly schooled my features into an expression of fretful preoccupation. I plucked a few threads loose from the cuff of my sleeve, the better to give a subtle appearance of fidgets and care, and was worrying at the tips of my gloves when there appeared before me a young man of somewhat dandified appearance.

He did not look as if he had recently suffered a very public lecture from his father and chief proprietor of the store. His pale face was unremarkable, without expression, and his eyes behind round, tinted spectacles were watery. His costume was, however, a trifle too pretty to be considered strictly _sober_. Men of the respectable working classes do not typically affect such a collection of fine touches as Mr. Finch. His ascot was a peacock blue, and the stickpin which secured it was in the shape of a horseshoe. His cufflinks were similarly over-smart, and his waistcoat was a soft grey in colour, fastened with white buttons, which did not speak to much sobriety of mind.

One could imagine such a man playing, perhaps, the part of a seducer of a very overawed little housemaid without much experience of life, but I struggled to imagine how he might have won the attention of somebody like Lady Cecily. But then, by most accounts it was she who had attracted his attention, and only accidentally encouraged it with kindness before being obliged to put him off.

“How can I be of assistance, Miss—ehm—Meshle, is it?” he wondered. I bobbed my head so that my hat wobbled just a trifle against its pins.

“Yes, Mr. Finch.”

He began to assure me that my application had every chance of being met with success. I must have very much astonished him by then appearing to sniffle fearfully into my handkerchief.

“Oh, Mr. Finch, if you had only told me so yesterday I should have been ever so glad to know it! I had come along today, you know, to enquire as to the success of my application, but I very much fear I may be required to withdraw it instead.” I plucked artistically at the small bag I carried, the better to convey pragmatic feminine timidity. “I don’t mind telling you that this place is being _watched_ , Mr. Finch. By a policeman! I am a respectable girl, or trying to be, and my mother would _not_ want me to enter into anything _untoward_. I cannot on any account be mixed up in anything that attracts the attention of the _police_.”

Mr. Alexander Finch regarded me with an unusual steadiness of gaze.

“Miss Meshle, you astonish me. A policeman, watching us?”

I fussed with a crease in my sleeve that wanted no adjustment.

“You may look outside yourself if you doubt me, Sir, and well do I imagine you might. But he is watching this place, I could not mistake his fixation.”

I could see that Mr. Finch did, indeed, desire to ascertain that what I said was true. He made his excuses and went at once to the front door, where, looking to the right and left, he would have certainly observed what I had done just prior to entering: a constable, interrupted in his perambulation, standing under a lamp post and staring fixedly at the shop from which he expected that I should emerge with my sentimental trifles clutched safely in my hand.

Mr. Finch returned to me with an air that could only, with much generosity, be described as preoccupied. He did not argue when I politely informed him I must consult my dear mother before deciding whether or not to accept my offer of employment with the Emporium, but seemed instead lost to a world of his own. Of course, I knew very well that a young man might have any number of secrets he did not prefer to be known. The notion that a police constable—mine soon accepted my effusive performance of thanks with reddened countenance, and the fumbling assurance that he was only too happy to help—might uncover any such dealings would naturally be distasteful to him.

There might, indeed, be no connection between him and Lady Cecily at all. And yet . . .

I was taught to mislike that function of human physiology which we too often term _intuition_. “Intuition, Enola,” my mother had lectured on more than one occasion, “is the baser instinct which serves the untutored in lieu of their reasoning, deductive and intellectual processes. Intuition suited our species when we emerged blinking from the caves and did not know which way to run before the beasties set upon us, but we have advanced considerably beyond that point by now.”

I knew Mum would not like me to term that thing which bade me keep so close a watch on Mr. Finch my _intuition_ and so, mindful of her training, I returned to my lodging house and furnished my person with some potentially needful items and tools. As I did so, I reviewed, methodically, the facets of the case which directed my suspicion to him.

It was not his dandified appearance that caused me mistrust; I did not think a young lady like Lady Cecily, who had conversed so simply and unaffectedly with my shopgirl persona, would be drawn in by that veneer. Nor was it the way his father had harangued him so openly and with such derision, for I knew better than almost anybody not to put stock by the opinion of a person’s family when evaluating their character and motives.

No, I thought, it was three things, principally, which made me think Mr. Finch was a person on whom a watch should be set.

First, there was his unnatural calm when his father had abused him so roundly. I had detected not even the slightest flicker of emotion in his face, not remorse or anger or embarrassment. He had not even been affectedly haughty, as many young men in his position might be tempted to do. He had instead been so far removed inside himself as to appear as one who was not even there.

Second, there had been the remark of the clerk when he learned I sought employment, and particularly desired to speak with the younger Mr. Finch. One of _those_ , he had said, with a knowing air. One might, if of a sordid turn of mind, fancy Mr. Finch kept some personal _harim_ of shopgirls he chose and hired, which, if I were more the sort of girl who resembled Lady Cecily, I supposed would be a fair assessment. But even my professional persona of Miss Meshle, though self-consciously smart, is not much more of a visual feast than my own character of Enola Holmes, and so I doubted that such might be his aspersions.

There left, then, the two remaining clues which combined to serve as the entirety of the third. One, the father’s upraised voice when the door had opened clearly referred to some manner of _anarchist mob_ with which he imagined his son might associate. Two, in conjunction with that, there were the artistic drawings of Lady Cecily herself. These I fanned out on the bed before me, as much for my own continued appreciation of their unique artistry as to reassure myself that my memory had not played me false.

Mr. Finch was depicted, of course, in his character as it was known to me, a bland and self-effacing shop clerk decently shrouded behind the indecent profusion of merchandise strewn on a modern counter. However, he had been familiar to me in another guise than that, and it had taken me almost the entirety of our interaction, right up to the moment that he had stiffened and whipped around and made for the door to examine the person of the police constable, to remember in what other form he had appeared.

There was also in my lady’s secret portfolio a sketch of an impassioned speech maker, gathering around him a rough and ready looking crowd. It brought to mind the rumblings in Parliament of late, the concern about the revolutionary sentiment brewing down at the docks and among people of what my brother Mycroft would call, fastidiously, _a certain class_.

But it also brought to mind the shape of the shoulders and the half-hidden face of the speaker himself. A featureless form in many ways, the entirety of the speaker’s personality could be said to come from a _reflection_ evinced in the crowd gathered round. But those same smooth, unremarkable features were duplicated in the lady’s other art, and they had been duplicated in life when he stood before me that morning, in the utterly unremarkable and yet, unlikely though it seemed, revolutionary firebrand persona of Alexander Finch.

~*~

Acting with all speed was imperative. I had unwittingly set a cat among the pigeons in presenting to Mr. Finch the figment of his own surveillance, imagining as I had at the time that this might affright him into leading me to Lady Cecily. I had hoped to pursue him to her hiding place, first supposing that he had her in his custody and, on learning a watch had been set on him, deem it advisable that she be moved, the better to keep her hidden in the twisting intestinal morass of deepest London.

Now, I saw, I may have set a fuse on a device that could spell my own end, or Lady Cecily’s, which second would be as like the first as anything else could be to me. If he were truly affrighted . . . oh, what harm might be visit on her? I could not bear to think of it.

The lady’s sketches I folded with all care and placed them uppermost in that useful device, my bosom enhancer, which could be persuaded to contain any number of needful items since there was, it is true, so little of my own bosom to occupy space within it. I took tea with my landlady, then returned to my room to continue my plan of attack. At the end of my scheming I fortified the false fringe and cheek and nasal amplifiers of Miss Meshle as Mr. Finch knew her, and returned through the dusk and lamplight, with a visible affectation of gallant bravery and carefully-veiled impecunity, to the Emporium which had offered me a position in its employ.

It was by now past supper time, and though it was dark enough now that the gaslamps within the shop had found true purpose for their use at last, the custom had dropped off significantly. This left a shopgirl free to bid me welcome to their ranks, and escort me out of the shop and down the street to the building in which the shop wares were stored and the shop girls’ dormitory was housed.

“There’s a very strict watch kept, of course,” said my guide, who gave her name as Blanche, which was not, I was quite positive, the name her mother had given her. Even for all her careful artistry of face-paints, applied with a hand almost as skilled as my own, Blanche had the look of somebody who had been born in the countryside, named Mary, and came into the city on the first train for which she could assemble the fare to take her.

“I don’t suppose it’s the sort of thing that can be got around?” I said, affecting casual disinterest. Blanche’s step on the stair faltered.

“Well,” she said, “it depends on what you’d be looking to get around it to do.”

Ivy Meshle pursed her lips.

“I _do_ like a bit of fun,” I said, and Blanche’s step slowed still further. We were almost to the door at the top of the stairs, but she paused, shoulders set, and glanced back.

“I don’t know as you’d call it _fun_ ,” she said, “but about the only way anybody can get out at night is to join Mr. Finch’s lecture group.”

“A lecture group!” I scoffed, for Ivy Meshle was a girl who liked pretty things and learning how to get them. She did not attend talks at the Temperance Society, or anything of that kind. Blanche, who clearly knew Ivy’s type, smiled in apology.

“It’s only how we get _out_ ,” she explained. “Mr. Finch has a man come and take them away to hear a speech. Improving their lot, or something silly like that. One needn’t stay with the group once the crowd gets thick. All one needs know how to do is get _back_ in time, or else you miss returning to the dormitory with the group and then you’re locked out for the night, and sure to get the sack.”

“I see,” I said, and indeed I did. _One of those_ , the clerk had scorned, imagining I was here to join the knot of happy hobbyist anarchists Mr. Finch’s pet speaker led forward in his thrall. One of those, whose departure doubtless served as cover for any girl who could not get out otherwise on her own time, for fear some stain of immorality might attach itself to her character and thence to the character of the shop.

Blanche opened the door to admit us to the women's dormitory and its neatly-ordered ranks of beds and small cupboards for the containment of personal effects. As I followed her to the unoccupied bed which was to be set aside for my use, I continued to mull the problem over.

Might it, I wondered, be under cover of one of these same outings that Finch himself had contrived to spirit away poor Lady Cecily?

“Are the lectures held every night?” I wondered, stooping to place my carpet bag on the bed and affecting to sift through my belongings, as if wondering which merited a place in the little cupboard.

“Most every,” said Blanche. “Not all.”

“Well there be one tonight?”

“To be sure. Mr. Finch’s friend Mr. Shaw didn’t show up last night, so he’s bound to tonight. You need only act as if you’re interested, then fall to the back. You can slip away when they round the first corner. I don’t know as he’d even notice we’re gone, now his new pet has come to stay.”

So saying, Blanche jerked her hand airily in the direction of the farthest bed along the row, well shrouded in the gloom of the rafters. The modern verve which kept the shop so lit with gas had not, it seemed, extended to the humble dwelling place of the girls themselves, and so I had missed seeing the little figure bowed on the edge of the bed until she was particularly pointed out. Once my attention was drawn to her, however, I could not look away. For I _knew_ that slender form, the bowed head that I had seen but once, and been unable every moment since the first to forget.

“Her name’s Margaret,” said Blanche, “and she’s not much of one for talk, but when she does speak it’s mostly of Mr. Shaw. She makes it sound as if he’s the only food she’s ever known.” Then Blanche moved off to her own bed to poke about among her things there, leaving me staring, with pounding heart and moistened palms, at the dainty little figure arranged on the farthest bed.

Margaret he might have named her, but I knew she had not been christened such before this very morning. The little figure languishing on her bed as one who has forgotten how to get off it was the same one who had the night before gone out a window and down a ladder as though it were no terrible feat, vanishing into the night only to reappear on a bed in the shopgirls’ dormitory of Ebenezer Finch & Son.

Lady Cecily Alistair.


	3. Chapter 3

~*~

_Act the Third_

~*~

I could hardly contrive to communicate frankly with Lady Cecily when we were in so public a space, but oh! How I longed to. I did at least manage to move my bed some spots nearer hers, when Blanche was not looking, so that now not even a half-dozen iron cots stood between me and the object of my quest. She reclined on the bed as one quite unwell, and I wondered if perhaps she had not been drugged.

 _Not much of one for talk_ , Blanche had said, and well might it be said of any girl dosed with sufficient quantities of laudanum. But she roused readily enough when, after all the girls had returned from their work day posts, a strange sort of chime sounded through the room and appeared to serve as a signal for all within. The neat dark uniform of the shopgirls was quickly removed and set aside, and some put on the kind of cheap, smart garments that spoke to plans for an evening of fun while others donned simpler clothes and some even put on aprons, as if they expected a bit of dirty work at the lecture they planned to attend.

Under the guise of friendly curiosity I stole closer to Lady Cecily, who had lifted her head at the sound of the chime and looked around with a sort of tousled, newly-wakened air, as one who has been too long asleep and only just sat up.

“Hello,” I said, sitting beside her on the bed and watching carefully for any sign of recognition. “Will you be attending the lecture tonight?”

Lady Cecily stared out at me from a face that was, if it were possible, even more lovely than I remembered it. The remote, delicate reserve was perhaps a little increased from our first meeting, but there was still a deep and not-long-dormant vitality which spoke to something on the verge of being ready to wake. Her gaze seemed sleepy, and a trifle vacant, but there was no telltale sign of opiate use, so whatever he had given her to keep her docile it could not have been laudanum.

“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Cameron Shaw speaks from the heart of the people, and all we who thrill to hear him know we must answer the call.”

It was the strangest little speech I had heard. Like a child reading out her catechism, word perfect and passionless. I found it a trifle unnerving, to be honest, but before I could question her on the topic of her disappearance from the school the dormitory door opened and a frisson of excitement ran through the place.

“The hour is on us!” cried a voice from the doorway. “Cameron Shaw calls us to his side!” The declaration was every bit as stage-craft-y as Lady Cecily’s strangely recited little piece, and for a moment the atmosphere in the room was charged, as if by that _electricity_ which lit the street lights on the Thames Embankment. Many in the dormitory rose, Lady Cecily included, and moved toward the door. A few remained, disinterested but also clearly too well accustomed to this striking exodus of tenancy to even trouble to mark it.

I fell in step with the crowd, for what else could I do? Lady Cecily was going, and where she went I must follow, until I could determine by what degree of her own will she was actually here. The man Alexander Finch had lured her, drawn her out, won her by who knew what combination of illicit tonic and smooth, sweet talk and ensconced her like a secret prize in the female dormitory of his father’s own shop. Had he even fed her since her arrival? I noted she seemed to sway as she stood, and totter a little on her feet. And what manner of clothes were these she wore? Simple garments, plain and serviceable, too humble to have come from the foremost shelves of Ebenezer Finch & Son, though perhaps they had been dragged from the very depths of the store room below.

I did not quite dare to take her hand, though the urge to do so was on me most strongly. Instead I fell into step beside her and let the crowd surge around us as we descended the stairs and went out into the gaslit streets of London.

As she had indicated she would do, Blanche left the group almost immediately. After I shook my head at her beckoning hand, she melted into the thick, sooty fog of the night. Other girls did the same, and I observed that on achieving the street we had intermingled with a number of the male shop clerks as well, though not nearly of a quantity with us. The men, I suppose, were kept under laxer supervision and so did not require the shelter of their junior proprietor’s permission to depart.

As to Finch himself—why, where was he? I cast this way and that, searching the crowd for a glimpse of his face, but found none. Instead we were headed by a bearded man in dark clothing, a solemn figure, and not unfamiliar to me though for the moment I could not work out why. This, I thought, must be the speaker himself, Mr. Cameron Shaw. But where was his patron? Mr. Finch was nowhere to be seen, though to my discomfort Mr. Shaw made a special point of seeking out Lady Cecily in the crowd. He came right up to her and smiled down into her face, which was uplifted to his, her eyes set strangely blank and wide.

“Margaret,” he said, and his hand passed over her cheek in a kind of featherlight manner. “Margaret I am so glad you have come to join us. Our cause has much use for you. Great purpose will be yours.”

It carried all the weight of a salesman’s pitch; I saw nothing to recommend it. Even his tone in delivering the line was oddly flat, if forceful, but it had a powerful effect on the lady. Her eyes shone and her breath came sharp and clear. I thought, as he moved to the head of the group and she remained in the midst, at my side, that she even tottered a little less. It was as if his touch had given her some inner strength, the illusion of resolve, and she had determined she could bear up.

Mr. Shaw led us without another word down the street and across a main thoroughfare which divided our more respectable merchant borough from something considerably less savoury. Ever on we went, into the dark, as the stench of the water and the things it contained became gradually more and more powerful, until we came at last upon a milling crowd very near the docks that made it plain here was the agreed-upon place, and this the appointed hour.

The crowd seethed with something I could almost recognise, but not quite. There was _feeling_ here, enormous weight and power of passion, and even in the clutch of my most pressing concern for Lady Cecily, she who watched with pale face and wide, rapt, curiously unseeing and all-seeing eyes as the bearded man ascended the soap box set under a street lamp for his use, I could not help but notice the force of it.

All round us were a mix of people from various walks of life, none dressed as if they belonged to that class from which Lady Cecily and, to a certain extent, I myself had sprung, but certainly not all of them were shop clerks. They ranged from what might be called persons of the respectable working class all the way down to the dockworkers and lower besides, though none, I thought, were quite as badly off as some of the sorriest dosses who drooped on whatever step would hold them, begging for crusts until the cold and sickness carried them off when they had no more strength left to fight the pull to expire.

London teems with such types, though I know they are kept carefully back from the manicured sort of lawns and parks which are most frequented by girls like Lady Cecily, which to me begged the question: how had she even come to be here?

She seemed to have drifted beyond herself, her gaze fixed on the little figure below the street lamp. I touched her elbow to steal her attention away, but she seemed not even to feel my touch. How _curious_ I thought. How very unlike the girl I had met in the park. That Cecily had been sad and removed from the day by the power of her own sorrow, it was true, but she had still seemed in perfect command of her mind.

I did not think the girl beside me could claim the same.

“Cecily,” I murmured, touching her again. When this did not stir her, I said “Margaret?” but even at the sound of that name she scarcely blinked. So she was not affecting a disguise, she was truly unaware of almost everything around her save the words and sway of the man on the box.

With mounting frustration, I cast about in search of some means by which I might recall her to herself. For under the influence of opiates or not, the girl was profoundly affected by the man who spoke, who decried what he called the _opiate of the masses_ and called for some transformative work, some action of moment to cleanse, to disrupt and knock down and make way to renew.

It was a dreadful lot of noise, really. The shape of the idea under it had just enough truth to take hold, but there was no one idea you could actually lay hold of and say it was what his speech was about. Rather it was the _experience_ of his delivery, that anger and energy they all felt, having been too long held back, stomped down, made less of, repressed, which bubbled up all around us. He gave them no specific mission on which they might hang their hat, but rather drew out that broader feeling of grievance from each attendant and worked them into a terrible height of anger and rage.

Why? I could not understand it. It was not that what he _said_ was untrue, it was the way he said it that sat false and hollow. How could they not all see? The man on the box spoke with the character of a speech maker, impassioned in his performance. But that was all it was: a performance. A stage craft, false front and unfelt. It was only those in the crowd who _felt_ and it was the man on the box who took their ability to feel, and turned it all into . . . what?

I looked around for one—any—who might explain this all to me, to tell me why they came here so many nights, and saw none who looked much different from Lady Cecily herself. Their eyes were glazed and glassed-over, they even moved their bodies in time with the motions of the man on the stage. It was, I saw suddenly, as if he had worked some manner of mesmerism on all of them. Taken them right out of their own thinking minds, and into the part of them which could only _feel_.

I remembered the passion of feeling that had inspired me to flee my brothers, and I wondered, if I had possessed even one modicum less of my own intellect, and if my mother had not so consistently and assiduously trained me in the implementation thereof, if I would have been able to bear up under those earliest days without her, alone.

I looked to Lady Cecily, whose hand had been bound to whatever surface those who governed her fate had too long seen fit to affix it, and I thought it no wonder that a man like this one had been able to reach into her soul and draw forth such frenzy and passion of feeling, that the same vivid character she showed so clear in her drawing could be warped and used to this end. He would have too coldly and gladly made use of that beautiful, sensitive temperament which so keenly peered into the soul and being of another, any other, she might even once encounter in the street.

And then, remembering that ability of Lady Cecily to so divine the truth of others, the answer of how to break her loose from his grip came to me. Unnoticed by the crowd, who focused on the words and hollow, vampiric passion of the rabble rouser, I fumbled at the neckline of my gown and drew from the depths of my amplifier those sketches I had rescued from the back of Lady Cecily’s watercolours. The little orphans in their lines, the colourless shop clerk behind the counter, the same man in the person of a revolutionary . . . _oh_.

I looked down at the sketches I held, thoroughly taken aback. Why, I had known all along the identity of the man on the crate. I had even marked it myself. How had I forgotten that? Perhaps I was not so immune to the power of his speech as I would have liked to believe. But no matter. I was as confident now that I held in my hand the power to break his hold over Lady Cecily as I was in the truth of his identity and aims.

For Alexander Finch lacked the true soul of a revolutionary.

I was _raised_ by a revolutionary. The true kind are a fearsome breed. My mother is a Suffragist, a firebrand, a woman whose right fist will make itself felt in your jaw for a week's worth of Sundays and so much more besides. I know what it means to see those who take their own oppression and turn it around, channel it into rage and purpose and a desire to reform. It can be terrifying, yes! Especially because one does not like to think of one’s own mother as the sort to set a spark to a powder keg, no matter how justified she might believe the ensuing inferno to be. But I knew my mother was sincere, and there is much otherwise incomprehensible that can be understood, when one first understands that.

If Finch had been of _that_ type, I might have proceeded differently. He was without doubt the verbal punching bag of his father, and to a sensitive and artistic type such treatment might well spark a desire for change. But I did not think it was truly change that Finch sought; it was only to grasp that power that was, in the comfort of his home and the safety of his middle class position, so rudely denied.

What so enraged me in that moment was not that Finch sought to foment rebellion. Indeed, the energy and sentiment of the crowd itself had much to support it without the perfidious influence of Mr. Alexander Finch, or Cameron Shaw, or whatever it was he called himself. He spoke many things that were true, and I think it was that very underlying truth which made it such easy work to sway and steer the crowd. The _movement_ , such as it could have been, had much to commend it, though I did not think that bloodying the skulls of dockworkers was much of a way forward where the dockworkers themselves and their poor families were concerned.

No, what stoked me to such rage was that Mr. Finch was not sincere. He sought no revolution for the sake of progress, nor social change in truth and deed. He desired only those things they could give him that were denied to him at home: the mad adulation of the crowd, the power he drew from his ability to direct their fervour, much as he wielded that fearsome mesmeric power over poor Lady Cecily herself. He had seen the sincerity of her feeling, the truly egalitarian bent of her soul, and he had worked a poisonous perversion upon it, misdirecting her goodness and her concern for his own malicious pleasure.

My blood ran cold then hot at the recognition of it: the understanding that this man would never stir to set his true name to any petition, fight for the passage of reform or bring about new, more just laws, but would gladly induce the workers he held in thrall to set a spark to a powder keg just for the power-mad pleasure of seeing it all go _boom_ and knowing that whatever lives lost had been given for his own sake, and not the advent of real sea change. They were as _toys_ to him. He played with them for his _sport_. I had seen powder kegs once stacked in anticipation of grim need, the anticipation of thwarting a real problem, and though I had not condoned the enormity of such a threat I could at least respect the _sincerity_ of the women behind it.

Alexander Finch had no sincerity. He had only strings it gave him pleasure to pull, and some of those were attached to she who I had bent my every waking moment, my every labour and effort of the past two days, to rescue.

I moved forward to cut them now.

  
  


~*~

“Lady Cecily.” I unfurled the page before her. “Lady Cecily, please; only look.”

The drawing I gave her was not of the place we stood now, surrounded by pallets and crates and people too long denied their place in the world who longed so hard to believe. It was not of the colourless clerk behind the shop counter, or the children imprisoned in the orderly rows of a life mapped out for them the moment they were born.

It was a sketch as yet incomplete, a long and unyielding figure of a young woman walking away, alone and unbowed, upright and sure of her going, though with every step she ached to leave.

I showed Lady Cecily myself as last she had seen me, and when her eye was caught by the figure, I drew out my own little pencil and, bracing the paper against a crate that stood handy by my side, contrived to complete the picture.

In so doing, I placed _her_ by my side. Small and sure, with a sort of swing in her step that I thought must be rightfully hers, when she was not such a prisoner of her pending marriage and the easel to which she was bound, forbidden to place even her true artist’s hand in service of the art. Her head was tipped back a little, as though the sun had come out and she had made free as to raise her chin and feel the warmth caress her face.

It was not an ending that I drew for her, but a beginning: a promise of what could be, if she would only consent to reach out and seize it.

I hardly dared glance up as my pencil moved, the imagination which seized me in that moment carrying me quite away with a passion and fervour of my own, until the sketch had taken form and two girls, not one, were shown walking away from a place that had nothing new or good to offer, away into something undefined, but not unpleasant; not oppressive, but simply unknown.

It might, I thought, lifting my pencil at last, have even been adventure that awaited.

I found myself hoping it were so.

Then I looked up again into Cecily’s face, and found her looking back. _Really_ looking back, from her own self and person, bright and understanding and not a little taken with wonder at finding me there, of all places, near the dockyard after dark, when as far as her mind could recall our acquaintance we had last parted yesterday on my offer of freedom, if she would only accept it.

The offer, I wanted to tell her, still stood. It would stand as long as it took her to take it. But the way she looked at me was so affecting, I found I could not actually speak, and instead only fervently hoped she might know.

“Why,” she said, “it’s Enola, isn’t it? Enola Holmes.” Her voice was so lovely and strong and clear that it was as if she had said _yes_ to me the morning of the day before and put her hand in mind as I had then so longed to see her do.

“Yes,” I said. My voice strangled a little ‘round the centre of the word, and I could not even be ashamed, because she was _here_. Whole in body, and spirit too. I had found her! As I had said I would. I would still act to effect her liberty, if only she would tell me she wished it. “Yes, and you are Lady Cecily Alistair, and if you would allow it, I have come to take you home.”

“Home!” she cried, in disgust. “What home is it you speak of? Home, to my father who scorns people on the strength of nothing more ephemeral and inconsequential than the station into which they were born? Home to the man he would sell me to in preservation of what he calls my good name, my odious cousin Bramwell? Home to that school where my hand was struck for daring to move as nature bade it, in joyful service of my pen? What home have I that is worth returning to, Miss Holmes? At least _here_ I am the useful tool of Mr. Shaw, and if he will consent to direct me as best he can, then here, at least, I might possibly effect some good.”

I understood, fully, the desire to function independent of shackles, no matter how finely-made. I had not the time to tell her how well I understood, but I needed to impress upon her as quickly as I could the trap into which she had fallen.

“At least walk with me a little way,” I improvised. “As I asked you yesterday to do. I ask for the moment no more of you than that.”

“Yesterday!” said Lady Cecily, and her eyes clouded over a moment in deepest confusion. “Can it be? It seems a lifetime ago that he found me. Mr. Shaw came to me in my dream and told me it was my time to descend to the masses on which I too long had trampled, and act in service of their cause.”

“Trampled?” I echoed, grateful at least that she consented to place her hand in mine and be steered away from the thronging crowd. “Who have you trampled, my lady?”

“Why, all of them,” she said simply, allowing herself to be steered. “By my existence in the world. My consumption of food greater than was my need, my donning of apparel meant to impress upon them my high station, my mocking laughter when . . . oh,” she faltered, as if the half-truth of this particular catechism he had striven to force-feed her was inconveniently revealed in that moment to her keener, more conscious self. “Oh, but I never _did_ laugh. Not at any of them. I felt great pity, yes, but no contempt. Never contempt. Why do I imagine that I did?”

“I think,” I said gently, “it was because he told you that you did. And you did not quite have the strength to question the truth of it. Have you even eaten today, my lady?”

“No . . . I don’t think . . .” she frowned, still clearly attempting to divine the origin of her own little speech. “Because of how much I have consumed that should have been theirs, he said I was not to eat until he gave me leave.”

Knowing all too well how thinly and poorly she would have been fed at Miss Harrison’s school, I could too easily imagine what toll such deprivation would take on already so small a form. Rage boiled up within me, inconvenient, and muddying to the intellect. Yet even so I indulged it, for her sake, on her behalf.

“You must have food,” I said. “Eating _enough_ is not a crime. Having _enough_ is not wrong. I do not think for a moment your father ever gave you more than only enough. It is simply the fact that they do _not_ have enough which is wrong. He has tried to confuse the two in your mind. You are compassionate, and so you let him.”

She did not reject my reasoning, but walked with it a while, reflecting. Then, as I drew her around a corner and out of sight of the crowd, which even now continued to grow, I attempted to ask again.

“It is not to your father that I would return you, my lady. Did you not yourself say your mother desired you to be free? That she opposed the marriage he arranged? We might return you to her, you know. Or, if you think your father would find you there . . .” The offer dearest to me hovered on the tip of my tongue. Before I could make it, though, harsh and insidious tones cut through the thick fog of the night.

“There you are! I wondered where you had run off to. What is this, my fine lady? Does the stink of the common crowd offend you so, that you must away to private quarters? It is an ugly sort of feeling, if you hope to serve among our number. Not fit for a pretty girl.”

The man who called himself Cameron Shaw towered imperiously at the end of the little alley I had chosen for our tête-à-tête. I cursed my own short-sightedness in choosing a path that was not open at both ends, and wondered if between us Cecily and I might have the ability to overcome him. I then wondered, even more doubtfully, if my lady would even have the resolve. I did not quite trust my breaking of the hold he had worked on her, for who knew how long he had been working to exert his control? Was the strength of two conversations, no matter how sincere and well-met the parties, truly enough to win out over that? I thought probably not.

But in that, you see, I had not reckoned with Lady Cecily.

“Who _are_ you, Cameron Shaw?” She did not speak as an aristocrat, save of course for her accent, which she did not trouble to hide. Indeed in the closeness of the alley her pretty little voice fairly boomed, bouncing off the walls and all around us. “Why did you take me from my bed, and bring me here?”

“Ah!” he cried, and I misliked the way his eyes glittered at seeing her so fully awake. “So she is herself at last, and not a moment too soon. Come, my fine lady, and walk with me, and I will show you _exactly_ what plans I have laid for you.”

He leaped for her then, without any warning but his own voice to precede it, and laid hold of her throat. She shrieked, then gurgled, for his hand must have squeezed most cruelly tight. My own hand flew at once to my bosom where I kept my dagger sheathed, only I could not see the profit in drawing it yet. He held her so thoroughly in front of him, with no room around even her twisting, frantic form for me to move and seek clear path to strike. I would only wound _her_ if I made any attempt on his person, and that I could not bear to do.

Yet I did advance at his retreat. I kept the distance between us as narrow as I could without permitting him to discern that I had been in any special way attracted by or connected to her. For all he knew we had only fallen to chatting away from the crowd, and I was as soundly under his spell still as one time Lady Cecily had been.

Paying me no mind he dragged her along with him, the dear soul, as though she were of no greater import than a straying dog he were hauling home after finding it had gone too far afield in the park. She whimpered and struck at his clutching hand to no discernible good effect, and he had in moments hauled her back with him to drag her up, onto the soapbox, and brandish her like a trophy beneath the searching sooty amber glow of the gaslight high above.

“Here!” he cried, as if bringing a clever object lesson for the amusement of his slavering crowd. “Here is one as oppresses you and grinds you down. She is a fine lady, who rides in a carriage, and though she might condescend to speak a kind word or two to a lowly shop clerk in the park, she will just as handily reject his advances when first he strives to make them! She is a liar and a deceiver, who does not act to effect true change! She is a _performance_ of virtue, a front of paste and paper lace, and if you would have your _revenge_ on your overlords, my fine fellowmen, there can be no better place to start than her!”

It might have worked, I think, on a less varied crowd, or if the person he had thrust forward as a trigger and target for their ire had been any less frightened, lovely, or so thoroughly captive a girl than she. But this collection of people ranged across several strata of London’s working classes, and my poor Lady Cecily, with her great, lovely eyes darting round in her little face, and the clothing he had made her wear being so plain and humble, did not a very fine lady look. Indeed, as he held her before him like a virgin sacrifice, in that moment he resembled not a great and impassioned orator but a cruel tyrant brandishing his victim. She, his affrighted offering, in turn most closely resembled that type of personage with whom many of these same folks would have been familiar: the highly sensationalised little kidnap victims in the _Pall Mall Gazette's_ shocking exposé, Maiden Tribute to Babylon. Having been told of the public effect wrought by that piece quite thoroughly by my own mum, I could have told Alexander Cameron Finch Shaw just exactly how well _that_ would all go for him.

The moment that he perceived the rumbling of the crowd had turned, not against Lady Cecily, but against _him_ , was one of the sweetest yet of my existence. When he drew her back roughly against his body, turning her from an offering to a shield, it was only her very terror which prevented me gloating in his own perception of what was about to be his downfall.

“Back,” he said raggedly. “Dear God, back, you _dogs_ , the lot of you. Filthy unwashed—”

They did not much care to be so addressed, I saw, with academic interest. Indeed the rumble grew much more pronounced, and one clear, strong voice with a note of familiarity to it rang out above the murmur:

“Let the lydee go, then, Sir, and see ‘ow you ‘andles a man’s fists!”

A glad roar of approval went up at this suggestion and again the crowd surged. I seized this opportunity to move around on the outer edges of it, pressing toward the front, keeping always a careful eye on the sooty cobbles lest I should lose my footing and do as too many unwary had done in London’s thickest fogs, and plunge directly into the Thames.

“Back!” Finch’s voice rose in a thin, screaming shriek. Keeping Cecily pressed close to his front he fumbled desperately with his free hand at something in his breast. What he pulled forth was, as such symbols go, almost agonisingly apt.

He held a match-book.

All at once the crates around him resolved in my focus as dramatically as if they were painted on the glass plate at a magic lantern show. The stamps, the warnings, the labels . . . merciful reason and rationality, I had trusted one of these things to bear my _weight_. But they were exactly as they had appeared in my lady’s drawing when first I saw it, and so foolishly mistook them for an artist’s abstraction rather than, as was her great talent, a true and unflinching representation of type.

Gunpowder. Absolute cases and crates of the stuff. Littered all over the docks . . . _why_? What had possessed the fool who left these here, like so much refuse flung into the midden-heap, to do so? Weren’t there regulations? Weren’t there _laws_?

Even if there were, what could it matter, what force did they wield, when Alexander Finch stood in that moment before me with one cruel hand clutching at my lady’s neck and the other holding aloft the very means by which he might blast us all right back to stardust?

I stood, for one desperate moment, as if I had been turned to stone.

I had my own dagger palmed and ready to use it, but could not make out my opening. I searched desperately among the stacks of crates for some sign that they were not genuine, were not true, and could see none. I had seen crates like these not long before, and they were too painfully of the very same type to give me the confidence I needed to doubt. They were _real_. They must be real, and I must treat them as such, for if they were and I did not, all would be lost.

Even as these thoughts flew like tumbleweed and thistledown through my understanding, the people around me were turning to flee. With screams of real terror, of mortality too close at hand, they took to their heels like the sensible folk they were and scattered in a flurry of pounding feet and clicking heels all over the brickwork of the dock road. The stretch of empty space around Alexander Finch and Lady Cecily was widening, and if it got any wider, he would see me coming too soon for me to take him by surprise.

I dove.

I knocked into his legs just at the height of his knee, and even in the confusion and concussion of the impact, could see and rejoice that the blow had knocked my lady free. She fell heavily against a crate, winded, but upright and alive. Then I drove my dagger into the nearest soft part of the fiend I could find, and had the great satisfaction of wringing from him a howl of agony that was a fitting match to the terror he had wrung from Lady Cecily when he had her by the neck. My second blow glanced off something stiff, a button perhaps, and before I could contrive to land a third he had knocked me off and started up, gasping, beard torn off, hanging crooked from just one ear, his spectacles lost to the street. His entire face was contorted in a grimace of lethal malice and his hand plunged into some inner pocket of his jacket, possibly fumbling for the match, for something else, I did not know: I could not make out what.

I never had the _chance_ to make out what.

Just as his hand closed on it, whatever it was, the thing inside his pocket so certain to secure him the victory that his grimace of fury shifted into gloating pleasure, a single shot rang out. His final expression as I saw it was not of victory, of fury or even malice. It was only surprise. Simple. Uncomplicated.

Done.

Then Alexander Finch toppled over the edge of the dock, and a splash was the last of him that I was to know.

Turning where I lay on the filth and unspeakable muck of the brickwork, I blinked into the dark and gloom beyond the narrow pool of light cast beneath the lamp post, struggling to seek the source of the shot. When the marksman stepped forward a moment later, letting the warm light flicker over his features, I was somehow deeply unsurprised to see it was a rough looking dockworker who had separated himself from the fleeing crowd. He stood with pistol still extended, a familiar curly forelock tumbling out from beneath the brim of his cap, and an unfamiliar expression of grimmest death writ all over his features. In that moment, regarding the way he beheld the man who had tried to harm Lady Cecily before turning his murderous attentions to me, I thought the family resemblance between us had never been stronger.

It was my brother, Sherlock.

Fittingly, my first words to him were not of gratitude, but an accusation.

“You _followed_ me!”

“I confess it,” he said. The hand which held the pistol disappeared into the pocket of his rough work jacket, and emerged empty. He moved toward me, one halting step at a time, as if he feared I might flee.

As though, with Lady Cecily clinging to me as she was, I ever would.

“I went to question Finch and saw you do the same. So I followed you, Enola. I do trust you, but I do not trust this city. One spark in the wrong place, and a powder keg may erupt.”

Wet and bedraggled with the patter of misting rain and stick of London’s interminable soot, I could only think of the truest thing I could point out in that moment. “I am too damp to erupt.”

Sherlock did not quite manage a smile, but I had the pleasure of seeing him try.

“Even powder once damped can be dried, and cured, and stoved in such a way as to render it fit to kindle once more.” He was within arm’s length of me now. His hands framed my face for a moment, as though he were recalling the look of it when Finch had reared up so fearsomely above me, and I do not think I imagined that I felt them tremble.

“I would have you fit to kindle in your _own_ time, Enola, though it singe my whiskers and black my shirtfront with soot and cinder in the process. Do you understand?”

To a wonder, I did. He would not want me blowing up, but he would rather have me ready to stoke to a fury at some injustice than to lose the chance to talk me out of righting it—and, when inevitably he failed, to follow me into the fire and do what he could to damp the flames. This, I thought, must be what I lost in all those years I had been without my brother—no, without my brothers. Both of them. For even Mycroft, I think, could have learned to love parts of me, if only he had been given the ameliorating approach of prolonged exposure. I _am_ a lovable person, under the right circumstances. When I glanced just to my immediate left, to the place where she held my arm, I could clearly see in Cecily’s shining face the full truth of that.

“Well then, my brother.” I cleared my throat, as glad of the chance to prove I could yet breathe as I was of anything else. “The powder kegs are duly damped, and so am I. Please, can we go home?”

The cab he found for us was a hard done by old thing, and its horse no better. I think the cushions were as stuffed with mouse nests as they were with horsehair, and more than one spring protruded to importune me in a truly tender and unmentionable area. But none of that, I soon found, could be said to matter. For with my brother on the one side and my lady slumbering sweetly on the other, I had all manner of comfort and completion I could be said in that moment to require, and though it would run my brother sixpence a mile it was no cost to me or my own peace of mind to set my cheek to the shoulder of Sherlock, just as Lady Cecily had rested her head on my own, and fall into the deepest and most exhausted sleep.

I did not wake again until morning.

~*~

To be roused in a comfortable bed after many misadventures and find the sweetest face smiling at me across my own pillow was so foreign to my experience, yet so desirous a circumstance, that for a moment I truly think I believed I had not survived the night, and rather ventured on to whatever Hereafter can be said to await us there. By the time I drew the conclusion that Lady Cecily in a nightgown and dressing wrapper—both my own, and looking far better on her dainty frame than they ever would on my gawkish limbs—was indeed leaning on the opposite pillow to stare with simple happiness into my face, she had already begun to speak.

“You are awake,” she said, and her smile, if possible, sweetened further still. “I am glad. Mr. Holmes says he has sent for Mummy, but she is already away in the country, you see, so she may be some hours yet. I would visit with you a little while, Enola, before she arrives. For all that I feel on some level I know you so well, I think we have scarcely had time to talk. I should like to remedy that.”

My wits and speech returned with gasping difficulty, having first, it would seem, contrived to desert me.

“Oh,” I said, and plucked fretfully at the threads of my counterpane. “I . . . I should like that, also. Very much.”

So it was that we both rose, and making use of my chamber as well as the little dressing-room beyond, where I found Sherlock had attempted, with some success, to provide clothing such as would be fit and suitable for a young lady in his charge. Mine were perhaps a little too short in certain areas, for he had underestimated my length of limb, and dear Cecily’s were rather inclined to droop and gather, for she was so much slighter of frame than I, but with much laughter and carefully-placed pins and tucks we nevertheless contrived to ready ourselves to face the day.

Mrs. Hudson provided for us a tray of food and pot of tea, that we could remain secreted in my room and partake of our meal without the harsher influences of masculine society to blunt the lighter notes of more feminine topics. I knew, of course, what my mother would say in the face of such fol de rol, but I could not for the moment contrive to feel the same. Not when it stole me precious minutes of Lady Cecily’s time, and allowed us to deepen our understanding of one another through conversation such as we had previously been unable to sustain.

It was a pleasure, truly, to encounter such an intellect and such passions in the person of a lady who could hardly, if one fell victim to the falsehood of the first appearance, be suspected to entertain great reserves of either, to say nothing of both. Her conversation was skilled, of course, as any young lady’s will be, but there was more to it than that. Lady Cecily in those hours kept nothing back, and as our time together drew short, and we agreed to continue our correspondence after her mother had removed her to a place of safety until the necessary legal proceedings were complete, I knew I had found a true friend.

As to what else she might be prepared to be . . . on that front, too, I had been given surprisingly little cause to doubt. A touch of the little hand on my own here, and a sidelong glance soon after . . . I might even have imagined that I dreamed it, only when I bent my head to retrieve a napkin and came back up from the floor, she, quite pink in her cheeks and looking remarkably determined about the mouth, leaned in with softest of touches and lips to capture my own.

I did not long wait to return the favour.

So, whatever we were to be going forward, we would be something, at least. As to the rest of it, or what name, if any, we might put upon it, I supposed I could manage to wait. I had already advanced enough of myself on her in two days that the grace of a little time to think, and space in which to do so, could scarce be called a trial.

Just before word reached us that the Lady Theodora had arrived, and was waiting to receive her daughter, Lady Cecily cast a considering glance around the room.

“Will you stay with him? Your brother?” For I had already poured out this aspect of my tale to her, and though she understood my reserve better than almost any other, she also perceived the manner in which I found myself divided.

I shook my head, troubled and not a little sad. “I do not know.”

“It seems as if it could be a happy home for you,” she noted gently. “Not that it is in any way my place to say, or observe, but . . . I should like to think of you that way, Enola. Happy. Until we can meet again and I may see the full truth of my hope realised.”

And here she rested her hand on the sketch that lay between us, the image she had begun and I had completed, the promise of the two of us setting off into some marvellous unknown, ready for whatever we might find there.

This was the point at which my lady’s lady mother arrived, and at receiving word of the news Lady Cecily flew down the hall, with me on her heels, to meet her. On our arrival in the parlour, several trailing threads of the finished work of our case suddenly ordered themselves in my mind. For there, standing by the fireplace with her hands bound up in knots fashioned with the worry that beset her own elegant fingers, was the very same lady I had observed leaving my brother’s home on the day I first arrived to entreat him to save the young lady I had only just met.

Her mother, whom I now surmised had come just a short time before me to implore him to do the same.

In the time it took these facts to arrange themselves in my understanding, Cecily had already crossed the floor and flung herself into the arms of her mother. Lady Theodora, weeping and laughing by turns, caught her up and spun her around and nearly tripped across her own trailing train. Only the fortuitous proximity of the mantel saved her.

Sherlock and I stood apart from this scene, observing it discreetly, and I do not know if it was so for him, but I did, myself, feel a pang. Were such a reunion ever to belong to me and my mother . . . well. I did press my knuckles to my eye, and I cannot imagine that Sherlock did not observe, but he was at least too tactful to make any remark. We saw my lady into her carriage, with her mother at her side, and off to the safety of the home that would shelter them until a greater assurance of their continued liberty might give them the liberty to return.

“She was your client,” I said, watching the elegant unmarked vehicle roll sedately away.

“She was,” said my brother, standing by my side.

“That she was already your client when you arrived at the school was the reason you spoke to Sir Eustace of previous entanglements which prohibited you accepting a commission from him.”

“The very same.”

“You summoned him to the school yourself, though.”

“I did. He had the greater authority of the two in that place to command a true search. I thought any potential legal impediment might thereby be got around, and did not scruple to use him to my own ends.”

“All this scheming, and yet you did not tell me any of it.”

“Enola,” said Sherlock, gently but with some force of remonstrance, “I might say the very same of you. Come now, do you really complain that you were not in my confidence when it is so clear I am not yet in your own?” He sighed and passed an abstracted hand through his hair, as if the problem of our relationship tugged at his curls. “Perhaps we do not yet know each other well enough to hold one another in trust.” He looked at me searchingly, with a thing I might have in any other person unhesitatingly called hope. “But perhaps, the day is not yet lost to us when we might.”

“Perhaps it is not,” I said. Yet it was monstrously difficult to think it could be true. How could I trust a person who did not trust me? Not merely with the name of his client, but also with the ordering of my own life? It was too much even for family to ask.

I felt my brother’s eyes on me as I turned to make my way back into his house. I did not cheek him for suspecting me of flightish tendencies, but only continued on to my room with a sedate and steady pace. Let him wonder. He would know soon enough if I intended to stay on, but he would only know my decision after I had made it, and effected its ends.

My room in his house was comfortable, ‘tis true, but it afforded me no true freedom. Not yet. Sherlock might come around to seeing me as a fit candidate for apprenticeship one day, but he had not yet so matured in his thinking that I could rely on it. Certainly I was in no _rush_ to flee just yet. There were, no doubt, skills that could be learned beneath this roof and I was of a mind to learn them. I would bide my time a while, I would eavesdrop at his door, I would learn the ins and outs of his trade for some days to come until the grim black-lace-mitts of some whaleboned tormenter loomed at the doorsill, and then . . .

Well.

There were a few windows unbarred yet, and a healthy young woman still has her liberty to guard. Sherlock would understand that, even if he could not yet bring himself to agree.

~*~

_Epilogue_

~*~

The scene inside the Stranger’s Room of the Diogenes Club shortly after midday at the end of that week is one of quiet consultation shared between two of its esteemed fellows. Mycroft, after a suitable exchange of barest pleasantry has passed between brothers, enquires after the younger’s most recent and prominent case.

“So the Alistair girl is safely restored to the bosom of at least one responsible parent?”

“Indeed. It was a happy reunion. Most affecting, in its way, Mother and daughter quite . . . quite glad, you know. To be together.” Sherlock weaves his fingers together at the joints and stares at them a moment, as if seeing the recreation of his accomplishment re-enacted on the knuckles there. His brother observes his manner closely, then affects to return his gaze to the periodical in his hand.

“Well. That will be something for the society pages, at any event.”

“Indeed. Though there is no reason to suppose it will ever make it that far. I do not think there is one party involved who wishes the truth of the matter to be made known. Lady Theodora contrives even now to remove the children to a property in the country to which she holds sole title, and a firm of solicitors is empowered to wage battle on her behalf. Sir Eustace will not find he has a leg to stand on, and the Lady Cecily is as safe from him as she is free.”

“You use this word ‘free’ as if it were a fitting one to apply to a young creature so gently bred. I wonder at your choice in this.”

“Perhaps I misspoke. The liberty which I have in mind is not that ungoverned hoydenism which I think occupies your thoughts, but rather the gentle freedom of, as you say, a creature gently bred who may yet endeavour, in the selection of her mate, to find true, rational happiness.”

“Ah.” Mycroft rattles his paper. “A most unobjectionable thought.” He inspects the facing page, then irritably closes and folds the circular with a snap. “No other salient points to speak of?”

“On the case? No indeed. Settled and sorted in every respect.”

“Until Monday, then?”

Sherlock stands and touches his forelock in farewell. “Until Monday.”

He has already crossed the room and achieved the door when the summons arises behind him, more querulous and less autocratic than his elder brother has long had cause to be.

“Sherlock.”

Sherlock pauses, arrested in the act of reaching for the door handle as much by the tone of the voice as by the sound of his name itself. Mycroft turns his paper one way, then another, appearing to forget its correct direction for a moment before he speaks again.

“You had previously indicated . . . you’ve seen her. Haven’t you?”

“Enola? I have. She stayed three days this time before it suited her to leave. A record.”

“She’s well? She has not fallen into any ignoble state?”

The faintest suggestion of a smile curls the younger Holmes brother’s mouth at the corner.

“She wore a false fringe and nasal amplifier when last we met. She was dressed as a shop girl with more attention to style than taste. But that is not immoral, merely unbecoming.”

“Sherlock!” cries the elder brother, tried at last beyond the facade of his patience and external reserve. “Sherlock, you have _seen_ her and, I infer, again contrived to lose her! Do you search for her? Do you know her direction? Is she safe? Is she well? Does she keep company with unseemly persons, or has she yet succeeded in avoiding irreparable ruin? Truly, that you think you can keep all news of her from me when I am at _least_ as concerned in the matter as you beggars all—damnation, man, why are you laughing?”

For Sherlock is indeed indulging his own mirth, though very little, and he begs his brother’s pardon for the apparent slight.

“Forgive me. It is only the tone of passion . . . she would be gratified, I think, to know that you cared.”

“Of course I care. She is _ours_ , little though she may act it. She is . . . one of us.” Mycroft pauses, silent, his every extremity of patience in observable work on his being before he asks, “ . . . well?”

“Yes,” says Sherlock. “That is exactly the word. She is well, Mycroft. I would even say that she thrives.”

Mycroft cannot countenance such fancy. He waves it off with an impatient flick of his periodical.

“This is London, Sherlock. The girl is clever enough, but do not indulge my concern for her at expense of the truth. Nobody who lives here _thrives_.”

Sherlock Holmes, however, does not recant his testimony.

“London is a sordid cesspit of vice and forgotten virtue, it is true, but who can know better than I that it may also serve as a living chessboard? I believe any fit playground for the intellect can put roses in the cheeks of those with the wit to wield it. And our sister, Mycroft . . . she blooms.”

And so saying, with a quiet smile and nod of his head, the great detective takes his leave.

**Author's Note:**

> I am so glad to have had the chance to make this for you. Your interest in a story featuring Enola/Cecily made my heart leap, and then your mention that you were open to a crossover with the film universe sent me in this direction, with joy.
> 
> I hope that this was something like what you had in mind. Thank you so much for the prompt that inspired it, and Happy Yuletide!


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